


Claw Marks

by Em_Jaye



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Sex, F/M, Ghosts, Halloween, Haunted Houses, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Torture, Ouija, Scary, Sex, Shower Sex, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:48:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26688424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em_Jaye/pseuds/Em_Jaye
Summary: Needing a reason to get out of the city with too many bad memories, Steve buys an abandoned house upstate. With fresh air, a project to occupy his time, and a seriously cute neighbor, the house is everything he was hoping for--except for the sounds from the basement. And the strange things that happen at night. And the feeling like someone was watching him when he knew he was alone...
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers
Comments: 308
Kudos: 345





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my Autumn 2020 fic! I've been in the mood to write a classic haunted house horror story for awhile and I thought, why not Shieldshock? Y'know. Like I always do. 
> 
> This is just me playing about in my favorite genre with my favorite pretty characters and hoping to scare a few of you along the way.

_Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it  
-David Foster Wallace _

i.

Bucky was out of the car first that morning. Steve watched as he stood on the sidewalk, next to the off-center mailbox on the molded wooden post and stared up at the house. Steve had known his best friend long enough to know that he was doing an inventory, taking in the faded paint, the dark windows, and sagging gutters. The roof looked patchy at best, the front steps were covered in dark moss and if he were someone else, Steve would think the whole place looked…cold. Sad. Like even it didn’t want to be there.

“Steve,” Bucky said as he stepped out of the driver’s side and closed the door behind him. “I thought you said you bought a house. Not a…19th century home for unwanted children.”

Steve came to stand next to him. Sam sidled up on his other side. The three men stared up at the house. “It is a house,” Steve said with a scoff. “It’s just old.”

“No, man,” Sam shook his head. “’Just old’ implies there might be some… I don’t know. Charm you can scrape out of it,” he frowned. “This is just…”

“Depressing,” Bucky decided.

“It doesn’t even look safe,” Sam went on. “Why did they let you buy this?”

“It’s not that bad,” he insisted, trying to keep the irritation from his voice. “And in case you forgot, _you_ aren’t the ones living in it.”

“How could we forget you abandoning us to move into this condemned-ass-house two hours away from the city? Sam asked.

He scoffed again. “How is me still paying rent on a room I’m not living in anymore abandoning you?”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Bucky argued. “You know you’re the buffer.”

“Right,” Sam agreed, following when Steve turned back to start unloading the U-Haul. “When we kill each other, it’s on you.”

He rolled his eyes. “Natasha is back in two months to take over my lease,” he reminded. “You’ll be fine.”

“Two months is forever,” Bucky said plainly.

“More than enough time to kill each other,” Sam said.

“Look at that!” Steve said before he unclamped the lock on the trailer door and rolled it up. “You guys just agreed on something. You’re getting along already.”

He didn’t have a lot of stuff. Most of what he’d packed to move up from the city was his bedroom furniture and the desk and chair he used to work from home. There were boxes of dishes and pots and pans that he’d acquired in the six weeks since he’d closed on this four-bedroom Victorian. Books and pieces of art that he’d hang on the walls. But as they emptied the U-Haul of his belongings and loaded them slowly into the house, it was becoming abundantly clear that this was way too much house for one, single man.

Bucky volunteered to make the first pizza run as the sun started to slip toward the trees again in early afternoon. Steve and Sam stayed behind and started cleaning—despite Steve’s insistence that was going above and beyond the call of friendship on Sam’s part.

“Hey, man, I wasn’t kidding about this place not looking totally safe,” he said as he descended the stairs with a crumpled rag of newspapers and the glass cleaner. “You’re gonna want to make sure the ceiling’s reinforced before you hang your punching bag upstairs.”

Steve stood from where he’d been pushing a pile of dust into the pan. “Does it look that bad?”

Sam shrugged. “I know how hard you hit,” he clarified. “I don’t think it’d stay put more than two or three workouts without some extra beams.”

“Shit,” he muttered. “I guess I can try down in the basement.” He finished with the dust and dirt, dumped the contents of the pan into the garbage bag hanging on the doorknob in the kitchen and pulled open the door to the cellar. He reached blindly alongside the wall before he remembered that there was no light switch. The only light below the house was a single bare bulb, accessed by a pull-string in the middle of the room.

It was cold downstairs. Colder by far than the rest of the house. The air felt a little damp, like an early morning and Steve fought a shiver when he reached the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t want to have to hang his punching bag down here. He didn’t like basements on new houses, let alone two-hundred-year-old abandoned properties. Steve squinted in the dark, trying to make out the shapes pressed along the wall.

Water heater.

Furnace.

Ancient washer and dryer he’d already replaced and would have delivered to the upstairs bathroom by the end of the week.

Doorway.

Steve stopped.

Doorway?

There shouldn’t be a doorway down here. It was one, open room according to the photos. Frowning, he pushed down the urge to run back upstairs like an eight-year-old and moved toward the center of the room. The shadowy doorway stayed where it was along the far wall. Tucked almost out of sight. He squinted harder. _Was_ there a door? Had he missed that somehow? The thin chain for the light brushed against his face and he reached up to pull, bathing the room in an uneasy yellow hue. He blinked in the harsh contrast and stared at the place where the doorway had just been.

It was gone. Smooth concrete covered the walls from floor to ceiling.

He felt a prickle along the back of his neck. A faint twist of dread crept into his stomach. The feeling that he had wandered somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be.

“Oh, no—” Sam said, startling Steve so that he jumped a foot in the air.

“Jesus,” Steve said, breathing hard as he turned around. “Make a noise.”

“Make a noise?” Sam repeated, looking confused. “I clomped all the way down here talking to you. How did you not hear me?”

He blinked and looked back at the wall and then back to Sam. “Sorry,” he huffed. “I was just—” he shook his head. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

The look of confusion on Sam’s face did not fade, though it shifted a little to concern. “I was just—uh—saying that it doesn’t look as much like a kill room as I thought it would down here.” His dark eyes moved up and examined the exposed beams. “You’d probably be okay hanging the bag from one of these.”

Steve nodded and resisted the urge to look back one more time. He knew he’d seen a doorway there. Only there couldn’t be a doorway there. Of course not. “Yeah,” he said distractedly, motioning for Sam to go first back up the stairs. “Yeah, maybe.”

There was sound from the front of the house. “Hey!” Bucky called as they reached the kitchen again. “I brought pizzas! And a girl!”

Sam looked over, skeptical. “Sounds like a full-service pizza place,” he muttered.

Steve grinned. “Sounds like Bucky being Bucky.” Too good looking for his own good. Unable to go anywhere without someone falling in love with him.

They rounded the corner and found Bucky setting two extra-large pies and a six-pack down on a table made of boxes shoved together. Behind him, near the still-open door and holding and a medium pizza of her own with a Styrofoam takeout box on top, was a woman who looked to be about their age, in a pair of faded jeans and a black t-shirt. She had long, dark hair pulled up on top of her head and very large glasses, like the kind his mom used to wear in the eighties.

“Hi,” she smiled brightly. “Which one of you is my new neighbor?”

He blinked and felt himself stutter unexpectedly. “Uh, that’s—” he coughed and raised a hand. “That’s me. I’m Steve.”

She took a few steps into the room and met him halfway to shake his hand. “Hi, Steve. I’m Darcy Lewis—I live on the other side of your tree line.” With her head, she motioned to the patch of pine trees on the east side of the property. “I hope you don’t mind me inviting myself in for a second; I heard your friend talking about this place in front of me in line for pick up and I just wanted to say hi and welcome you to the…” her smile dipped for a moment. “Well, it’s not really a neighborhood but you get the idea.”

“Thank you,” he said genuinely. “I didn’t realize anyone else was around.”

“Just me,” she smiled again. “I’m so glad somebody bought this place—it’s been empty for so long. I kind of thought they’d just tear it down.”

“Jury’s still out on whether or not they should have,” Sam said from the doorway to the kitchen where he’d retrieved the roll of paper towels. He crossed the room with a warm smile. “I’m Sam, by the way. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too,” she said as they shook. She looked from Sam to Bucky and back again. “Are you guys staying long? Or just up for the day to help unpack?”

“Just for the day,” Sam answered. “But we’ll probably be back sooner rather than later.” He glanced over his shoulder back at Steve. “Keep an eye on this one, would you? Make sure he doesn’t go all _Castaway_ on us up here by himself.”

“I’m _two hours_ outside the city,” Steve insisted with a laugh. “And we all have cars. Stop acting like I’m hollowing out a tree and living off sap and bugs.”

To his surprise, Darcy laughed. It was a nice laugh, he decided. It bubbled like champagne. “If I hear him talking to a volleyball, I’ll stage an intervention,” she promised lightly before she looked back at Steve. “But seriously, I’m just across the lawn if you need to…” she grinned again and to his surprise, her cheeks turned pink, “borrow a cup of sugar or something.”

“Yeah,” he nodded. “Uh, thanks. I appreciate it.”

“Enjoy your pizza,” she said as she turned toward the door. She stopped right before she stepped outside and turned back. “Oh, and if you want really good donuts in the morning? Foster’s, across from the pizza place? Best in the world.” She wiggled her fingers. “Sam, Bucky, it was nice meeting you.”

“You too,” Bucky called before she pulled the front door closed behind her. He waited until they heard her descend the mossy concrete steps before he looked over at Steve. “Literally the first argument I’ve seen for you moving here.”

“Well there you go,” he said, following Bucky’s lead to sit on the floor and use the unpacked boxes of art supplies as a table.

“Doesn’t count,” Sam assured him. “You didn’t know she lived here when you signed on this place.”

“But if you wanted to start talking to a volleyball so she calls us to come back for a visit,” Bucky went on, flipping open the box closest to him to reveal a supreme pie, “I’m not gonna say no.”

Sam pointed at Bucky while he reached for the first slice. “He’s not wrong.”

“Two agreements in one day,” Steve said with a false brightness. “You guys are practically best friends.” He clapped a hand to each of their shoulders from his place between them. “Y’know, I think me moving out is the best thing that could have happened for you two.”

They ate and drank a few beers and roasted each other for the next few hours; Sam and Bucky offering unhelpful suggestions while they watched Steve assemble his bookcase before it got too dark to see with the house’s limited lighting and they called it a night.

***

His first few nights in his new house were unremarkable. After Bucky and Sam headed back to the city spent his days unpacking and slowly moving in. He set up the smallest of the bedrooms as his office and started the process of checking in with all of his freelance clients in between emptying boxes and trips to the hardware store.

There were things he noticed—things that he didn’t quite understand. Like why the house was so cold, especially at night. Or why, if it was so cold, he kept kicking his covers off in the middle of night, only to wake up freezing and find them bunched or hanging from the foot of his bed. He might have noticed other things if he hadn’t been so busy, but he was.

That was the whole point—to buy this house and give himself something to do. Some place to focus his energy that wasn’t in the city where’d he’d lived his whole life within twenty square blocks. Where his mother had died only a year and a half ago. Where his girlfriend had left him six months after that to marry someone else. Where it felt like everywhere he looked there was another bad memory waiting for him.

The cat appeared on the fourth morning. When Steve had decided to see how derelict the back porch was, she was sitting on the steps as if she’d been waiting for him. She was small, a gray and brown striped tabby with green eyes and extra toes on her dirty white front paws. Steve stopped short at the sight of her, sitting among the dead leaves he’d been about to sweep away, and smiled. “Hey there,” he said, crouching down slowly to extend his hand.

Immediately, the cat stepped forward to rub her face against his palm. She started purring when Steve scratched his short nails behind her ears. “Where did you come from?” he asked lightly, noting she had no collar. He stopped to stand up and reached for the broom again, surprised when the cat sat back down, closer to his feet this time, and looked up with an expectant chirp of a meow. He smiled again. “Sorry, sweetie,” he said and gave her another scratch. “I’m not really a cat guy.”

She didn’t leave the porch while he swept and stayed close enough to brush up against him while he examined the wooden planks. He was pleased to find that the floor wasn’t rotted through anywhere. All it needed was to be sanded and repainted and have a few pieces of the railing replaced. He looked at the sky—late September in upstate New York was proving to be bright and crisp and beautiful. Another clear blue sky hugged the lacy edges of trees that were only just starting to turn yellow.

The sound of a car door closing startled him, and he looked down from admiring the leaves, surprised to see that a beat-up Subaru had pulled into the driveway that was visible between his trees. Without meaning to, Steve felt himself smile at the sight of Darcy, his new neighbor, popping open the hatchback. He was across the side yard before he realized it, ducking under a few branches until he reached the gravel on the other side.

“Want some help?” he asked once she’d pulled two grocery bags from the trunk.

Darcy jumped and looked up with a smile. “Hey!” she said cheerfully before she shrugged. “Sure, help yourself.” He grabbed the four remaining bags and followed her up the driveway. In comparison to his, her house was tiny. A little cottage with a big front porch and flower beds in need of weeding. She set her bags on the ground while she dug for her keys and glanced over her shoulder at him. Her eyes dropped and her grin widened. “Who’s your friend?”

Steve looked down, surprised to find that the little tabby had followed him from his porch. “Actually I was going to ask if this is your cat?”

Darcy shook her head as she turned her key in the door. “Looks like she’s your cat.”

“Oh,” it was his turn to shake his head. “No, I’m not a cat person.”

As if to deliberately prove him wrong, the cat started purring again, winding between his legs in a figure-eight. When he looked up again, Darcy was still smiling. “I’m disinclined to believe you.” She pushed open the door and motioned for him to go first. “I don’t know if my cats will like your new pal, but you’re both welcome to come in.”

Steve stepped over the threshold with the cat on his heels. “How many do you have?” he asked when she closed the door behind him. Her house was small, but cozy. She had built-in bookshelves stuffed with books and movies and framed photos. A deep loveseat and armchair and a small dining room table and chairs. On the armchair, he noticed with a smile, was a pile of orange, white, and black fur.

“Three,” Darcy said in the moment before three sets of ears and whiskers poked up from the ball of fluff. “Boys, be nice,” she said with a point in their direction before she nodded to her left. “Kitchen’s this way.”

“You sure you don’t want a fourth?” Steve asked, following her through the dining room into a kitchen with soft turquoise walls and white painted cabinets.

She looked back with another grin. “I think you’ll find a cat’s a great pet for living up here in the wilds, new friend. Unless you really like rats.”

He grimaced. “I _don’t_ really like rats. Are they a big problem here?”

She opened a cabinet full of dry goods and began to unload her two bags. “Not if you have a cat.”

He looked over his own shoulder to see that Darcy’s three cats had approached the tabby and were sniffing her tentatively. No one was hissing—that felt like a good sign. “What are their names?”

“Frank, Sammy, and Dean,” she stretched up onto her tiptoes, revealing two inches of creamy pale skin of her lower back that Steve tried in vain not to find so appealing.

He blinked and shook his head before she turned around and caught him checking her out. “Cute.”

Darcy turned around with a look that said he definitely hadn’t been fast enough and grinned. “I know, right?”

He helped her put away her groceries before she offered him a cup of coffee and a sit on her porch. “So, are you flipping it?” she asked when they’d taken their seats and she’d folded her legs beneath her. The chairs outside were just big wicker armchairs with cushions so deep he felt like he was sinking into a marshmallow.

The gray cat jumped up into Darcy’s open lap and curled up in a ball. Her three had stayed inside, playing with a stuffed mouse and wrestling one another around the coffee table.

He looked up from his mug. “Flipping it?”

“The house,” she clarified, scratching long burgundy nails against the cat’s ears.

“Oh,” he shook his head. “Uh, no. I mean—” he cleared his throat. “I’m fixing it up but just because it needs the updating.”

She nodded, a slow smile coming over her face. “Do you have a…wife and three kids in the city who are going to be joining you later?”

“No,” he laughed. “Not that I know of.”

“Sorry,” she laughed too. “I don’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business. It just seems like a lot of house for just you.”

“It is,” he admitted and glanced down at his coffee again. “I don’t know,” he rolled his shoulder, suddenly aware of how much he didn’t want to be having this conversation. “The bank was trying to unload it for next to nothing and I’ve got—” he stopped. He didn’t want to say he had a bunch of money from his mother’s life insurance that he didn’t know what else to do with—even though that was the case. “I guess I decided I could do with a project.” He coughed and looked up again. “Is it just you living here?”

She nodded and sipped at her coffee. “Just me. I grew up here, though—in town. My mom still lives over on Hickory Street.”

“Do you mind if I ask what you do that you have time to hang out your new neighbor on a Wednesday morning while everyone else is at work?” he asked with a smile.

“Not much at the moment,” she said with a rueful grin. “I _was_ a teacher and I suppose I might be again,” she reasoned. “But I’m furloughed at the moment. The district’s in a bit of a financial meltdown.”

“Oh,” he frowned. “I’m sorry.”

She waved his words away. “It’s not the end of the world. I’m not in danger of being homeless or anything like that.” She smiled. “And I’m not too proud to let my mom help me out every now and then.”

He smiled again. “What does she do?”

“She’s a writer, actually.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Really? What does she write?”

Darcy bit her lip. “I…bet you’ve never read it.”

“Try me; I read a lot,” he challenged lightly. “What genre?”

The tops of Darcy’s cheeks turned pink. “Uh, paranormal romance.”

He laughed. “What, like vampires and werewolves and stuff?”

“Something like that,” she nodded. “Do you remember those movies that came out a few years ago, with Hayden Christensen? Where he’s a pirate?”

Steve felt a slow smile spread over his face. “The ones where he—uh—” he stopped himself, trying to figure out a way to phrase the most iconic scene of a movie he desperately wished he’d never—

“Fucks a mermaid?” Darcy finished for him, her eyebrows raised expectantly.

He laughed. “Turns out there’s not really a polite way to say that, is there?”

Darcy snorted loudly and clapped a hand over her mouth. “No, but I really enjoyed watching you try. And I should amend the record and say that he doesn’t fuck a _mermaid;_ she’s a siren and it’s very tastefully done,” she corrected around another cascade of giggles.

“I think we might be disagreeing on what tastefully done means,” he countered.

She barked out another laugh. “You’re probably right,” she admitted. “But yes. Those are the movies I’m talking about.”

“Your mom actually wrote those?”

“My mom wrote those _and_ the international bestselling series on which they are based,” she said. “So, we don’t knock siren porn in my house—it’s currently buying my groceries.”

Steve grinned. “Now I kind of want to read them.”

“I can bring you an autographed set, if you want.”

“Well that won’t help pay your bills,” he laughed again. “I was thinking I’d buy them to pad the royalty checks.”

“Oh,” she gulped at her mug. “Good point. Buy a few sets—one for all your friends.”

They finished their coffee, talking about Steve’s freelance career and where he should call for decent Chinese before they were interrupted by the arrival of the truck carrying his new living room furniture.

Steve waited outside while two men carried a couch, armchair and coffee and end tables into his house. When they were finished and he went inside, it was with the small tabby cat on his heels, assuring him that she was, in fact, his cat now.

***

By the time night fell, the cat had a name—Bossy—a bag of food and a litter box, a flea treatment, and a pink collar with a bell he cut off immediately after seeing how she tried to jump away every time it made a noise. Steve took Darcy’s advice and ordered Chinese while Bossy explored every inch of her home.

She followed him around, mostly, jumping and sliding around on the kitchen tile chasing a twist-tie while he put away his own groceries. A now familiar draft cut across the room, raising the hair on his arms before he crossed to the basement door and pushed it shut.

He ignored the way the goosebumps on his flesh refused to leave as he filled Bossy’s new bowls with food and water and set them in the dining room where, eventually, he planned on setting a table and chairs. For now, though, it was all hers. His own dinner arrived twenty minutes later, after he’d stocked his pantry and refrigerator with food that he promised himself he’d use to actually cook himself something. Tomorrow.

Steve ate with the baseball game on. No one he cared about had made it to the series, but it was something to fill the silence. He was halfway through his lo mein when he heard something that didn’t sound right.

_Scratch-scratch-scratch_

He frowned and reached for the remote, muting the announcer’s commentary while he tilted his head toward what he thought was the source. He heard it again.

_Scratch-scratch-scratch_

“Hey,” he called into the dining room. “Cut it out.” He didn’t want to add replacing hardwood floors to his list just because this little cat had decided to adopt him.

A new jingle ball rolled to his feet from beneath the couch and he jumped when he looked down to see Bossy wriggling out from just below him. He frowned when he heard the sound a third time.

Scratching.

Three times in quick succession.

Definitely not the cat.

Unease crawled up his spine as he stood up and followed the noise. He paused and listened in the dining room, waiting to hear it in the walls like the mice that had once made a home in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment. But it wasn’t coming from the dining room, he realized with a hard swallow.

He only made it two steps into the kitchen before he stopped short. His heart jumped up into his throat, his pulse hammering against his jaw as fear splashed over him like a bucket of cold water.

The basement door was wide open.

_Scratch-scratch-scratch_

Whatever was scratching was coming from downstairs.

Steve took a deep, steadying inhale through his nose and crossed the kitchen in a few strides. He slammed the basement door shut and twisted the lock into place.

When he turned around, Bossy was staring at the closed door. Her teeth bared in a hiss and all her fur standing on end.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I need to make something clear to put my sweet readers at ease. I realize that animals are often early victims in horror movies and some of you may be apprehensive at the mention of a sweet baby kitty early on in what has promised to be a horror fic. So let me just tell you that I would rather die than hurt an animal--in real life or in fiction--and assure you all that absolutely no harm will come to our sweet Bossy throughout this fic. 
> 
> That being said, THANK YOU for the wonderfully amazing and sweet reception you've already given this fic. It makes me so happy to keep writing it and I couldn't be more thrilled to creep you all out this October.

ii.

He tried not to think about the basement. The door was still closed and locked when he woke up the next morning, though he noticed Bossy gave it a wide berth and tended to stay out of the kitchen in general. That was fine, he thought as he ate a bowl of cereal in the living room. He didn’t want her in the kitchen, up on the counters anyway. And he didn’t need to get into the basement once his new washer and dryer arrived. They’d go upstairs in the master bathroom—the place he’d already decided would be his first renovation.

He’d lied to the bank when they asked if he had a lot of experience in renovating old houses. He’d said he did. In fact, he had zero experience in renovating old houses. Or anything else, for that matter. But he’d fixed things before. He was good with his hands. He’d watched _endless_ hours of HGTV with his mother when she was in the hospital. And he had the internet.

The way he figured it, if some woman could build herself a four-bedroom house from absolutely nothing by watching Youtube videos, he could renovate a few rooms in a house that was _already_ built. And he wasn’t a total idiot—he’d already paid for the electrical to be updated and the outlets replaced; a plumber had come by after the home inspector to replace anything that would cause an immediate problem. The bones and the guts were still good, all the professionals said. It was just a place that needed some love.

So, he spent his fifth day in his new house sizing up the bathroom, making measurements and browsing online for fixtures and videos that would teach him how to replace broken tile and lay new flooring.

By the time he returned from his third trip to the home improvement store in less than a week, Steve had managed to convince himself that he’d blown the whole basement thing out of proportion.

It was an old house, he told himself. The doors were unbalanced, and the latches didn’t always catch. There was nothing _in_ the basement that was there to do him any harm. The scratches were probably the rats that Darcy had mentioned and eventually Bossy would get curious and brave enough to go down there and catch them herself.

Or she wouldn’t, he reasoned, and he’d set some traps and relocate them.

Either way. It was rodents scratching at the floors and walls of an old, drafty house. Nothing malevolent. Nothing to be afraid of. Just a little pest problem.

Thinking all that made him feel better, but not enough to unlock and open the door while he was making dinner.

The cold woke him. It settled over him like an icy breath as he rolled to his stomach and reached for his blankets. He’d shoved them off on the middle of the night again and they bunched down by his hips. Without opening his eyes, he grasped the edge of the comforter and pulled it and the sheet back over his shoulder. He shoved his arms under his pillows and began to doze off again.

The second time, it was the sound that hit his ears before the rest of his body could register the shock and the cold. The rushing rustle of fabric that woke him while he struggled to make sense of why he was still so cold.

His sheets were gone again.

Steve groaned, half in confusion and half in irritation, and reached for them a second time. They were further down his bed, further away from his grasp. He sighed and rolled over onto his back and opened his eyes.

Someone was standing at the foot of his bed.

Tall. Imposing. Shrouded in inky shadows.

And undeniably standing at the foot of his bed.

Steve let out a strangled cry and reached for the light beside his bed. He scrambled to turn it on and jumped to his feet, spinning back to face his intruder; his pulse thrummed, adrenaline had shoved him off the cliff of fight-or-flight response and his hands raised automatically into fists.

But there was no one there. No one but him, looking wildly around a room that now felt much too bright for 3:16am.

More angry than afraid now, Steve took the baseball bat from beside his bed and stepped into the hallway. He cocked his head, listening for the sound of intrusion. Of someone else prowling around his house the way he was, room by empty room, checking closets and behind open doors, his heart in his throat and his breathing quick and shallow. He checked the whole house, upstairs and down and found nothing. No windows open. No doors unlocked. No sign that anyone else had been there.

But there _had been_ someone standing there. He knew it. He hadn’t been dreaming. He’d been _wide awake_ and someone had been in his house. In his room. At the foot of his bed. Watching him.

He slept on the couch with the tv on for the next few nights. One hand clamped on the blankets he pulled up to his chin, the other holding tight to the handle of his bat.

“Hey neighbor,” Darcy called cheerfully from her porch a few days later as Steve returned from his morning run.

He slowed down, breathing hard and waved before he stopped and used the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face. “Hey,” he huffed, accepting the invitation she waved at him to join her on her porch. Leaves had started to fall in the two weeks that he’d been there. They crunched under his feet as he walked up her driveway.

She gave him a once-over and smiled from her cozy curled-up position. The sleeves of her sweatshirt hung over her hands and curled around her mug of coffee like a hug. “Running on purpose, eh?” she asked before she shook her head. “I knew there was something wrong with you.”

He laughed and leaned against the porch railing, catching his breath after a few moments. “Aw, c’mon,” he smiled. “I’m not that bad. I could be one of those Cross-Fit freaks.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I can’t wait for the day the FBI classifies them as a cult.” He laughed again and she brightened. “How’s the demo coming?”

“Good,” he said easily. “The bathroom’s almost done—I’ve just gotta figure out what color to paint.”

“Ooh,” she sat up, intrigued. “What are the options?”

Surprised by her interest, Steve took his phone from his pocket and found the color palette he’d put together for the whole room—an assortment of steely blues and grays that went with the white and chrome fixtures he’d been installing.

Darcy grinned. “Like a thunderstorm,” she said and tapped her finger to the screen over the bluest of the three paint swatches. “I like this one the best.”

He glanced down at the screen. The color she’d selected was called Blue Eyes. “I like that one too,” he admitted.

“If you want some help painting, I’m very good,” she offered abruptly.

Steve laughed. “I don’t want to invite you over just to put you work.”

Darcy’s dark eyebrows lifted over the rim of her coffee cup as she took another sip. “So, invite me over for something fun and I’ll help you paint the _next_ time I come over.”

He felt something in his chest stutter. “Uh—sure,” he coughed lightly. “When do you—uh—”

She shrugged. “Whenever; I’m always free.”

He nodded and swallowed. “You…want to come over tonight?”

Darcy winced. “Ooh, wait. Is it Tuesday?”

“Yeah…”

“Can’t tonight.”

He laughed. “Well, I like that you’re unpredictable.”

She offered an adorably guilty smile. “Sorry, I just forgot that I told my mom I’d help cook and hang out with her for her book club tonight.” She cleared her throat and looked hopeful again. “But I could come over tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said quickly. Maybe a little _too_ quickly, the voice in his head—the one that sounded like Sam—chastised. “Uh, yeah. That’s…” he nodded. “Yeah. Good.”

She smiled. “Good. Want me to bring dinner?”

“Sure,” he repeated. “Whatever you want.”

“Fair warning, I pretty much always want pizza.”

He laughed again. “Me too.”

“Good,” she sipped her coffee again. “Then I’ll bring pizza.”

He had to get back to work—he had a video call with a client in an hour and he needed to take a shower and put on something other than an old t-shirt and gym shorts. But as he and Darcy said their goodbyes for the day, something nagged at him, causing him to turn back as he reached the trees. “Uh, hey.”

“Mm?” she looked up from her coffee again.

“This might sound weird,” he assured her, jogging back across the lawn. “But you…you’ve lived here your whole life, right?”

She nodded once before her head dipped to one side. “Well, I was gone for a few years of terrible decisions but,” she shrugged, “yeah, more or less. Why?”

“You don’t…” he frowned, wondering if he could ask what he wanted to ask without sounding like an absolute idiot. “You didn’t know the people who lived in my house before me—did you?”

Darcy looked confused. “No, that place has been empty my whole life. I think the last people who lived there were there in like, the sixties or seventies.”

He nodded, trying not to feel disappointed. “That makes sense.”

“But they would have been there when my mom was a kid,” she added after a moment. “I can ask her if she knows anything about them.”

He forced himself to shrug. “Yeah, I mean, if you want to. It’s no big deal.”

She studied him for a moment. “Something happen to make you curious?”

Flashes of his basement door, the sheets being yanked off his bed, the figure standing over him all flashed before his eyes, but Steve made himself shake his head and offer a brief laugh. “No, not really. Just wondering.”

She arrived on his porch the following night right at seven o’clock, looking almost too pretty for just a pair of jeans and a cozy red sweater that matched her lipstick. “I brought presents,” she said brightly, pushing a small stack of pizza boxes into his hands before she stepped over the threshold. He set the pizza and sides on the coffee table and watched, amused, as she closed the door behind him and pulled a bottle of Russell’s from her purse and held it out to him. “Housewarming gift,” she said. “Hope you like bourbon.”

“I do,” he assured her, accepting the bottle. “Thank you.”

“ _And_ …” she returned to her massive bag and rummaged for a moment. “That’s not all…”

“Autographed siren porn?” he guessed.

Darcy laughed and shook her head. “No, but play your cards right, pal. Christmas is just around the corner.” She looked back up with another smile as she removed a thick brown folder from the bag and offered it to him. “I wound up at the historical society today, just for you.”

Steve frowned in confusion. “For me?”

Without waiting for further invitation, Darcy kicked her boots off by the door and crossed the room to sit on the couch. Steve locked the door out of habit and followed her, dropped into the opposite corner and set the folder on the empty cushion between them.

“For you,” Darcy assured him. “At book club last night, one of my mom’s friends is the curator of our little local museum and historical society and she got _very_ excited when I asked if anyone knew anything about this place.”

Steve’s stomach twisted a little in apprehension. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, but we can look at all this stuff later,” she took the folder and dropped it to the far side of the coffee table, far from the food. “Let’s eat.”

They ate their pizza and garlic twists while sipping the bourbon she’d brought. It was good stuff—warmed his throat and made his head a little fuzzy by the time he poured another two fingers worth into his glass. Bossy jumped up on the couch between them and alternated bonking her head against Steve’s knee and letting Darcy scratch her behind her ears.

Darcy had a great laugh. He already knew that—he’d noticed it the minute he’d met her—but it was remarkable how good it was to hear it, to be able to appreciate how it bounced around the room and enjoy how her nose wrinkled and her cheeks turned pink. How the sound of her voice and her laughter and her presence in his living made the whole house feel so much warmer, so much safer, than it ever did when he was by himself.

“Tell me more about yourself,” she suggested once they’d finished the food and Steve had taken the boxes back into the kitchen. She was leaning against the back of the couch, her second glass of whiskey still mostly full in her hand while the other drifted lazily over the fluffy white fur of Bossy’s belly.

Steve shook his head and mirrored her posture. “I’m not that interesting,” he assured her. “Tell me about you instead.”

She smiled and let her teeth press into her full bottom lip. “What do you want to know?”

“A few years of terrible decisions,” he repeated her words from the other day back to her. Her nose scrunched again. “What did you mean by that?”

Darcy sighed and took a sip from her glass before she wet her lips. “Uh, well, they started out as good decisions,” she began. “I went to Brooklyn College, got my teaching degree, got a job right away—”

“You went to Brooklyn College?” he repeated.

She nodded. “Where’d you go?”

“Pratt.”

“Ooh la-la,” she joked. “Rich kid?”

“Full scholarship.”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “Of course it was.”

He laughed easily. “So, you were teaching,” he prompted. “In the city?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. Nice cushy little job at a private school, nice little apartment in Brooklyn Heights. What I _thought_ was a nice little relationship with a nice, stable fiancé…” she trailed off and took another sip.

“Is this where the terrible decisions started?”

“Start and end, thankfully,” she said. “It was really just the one terrible decision, but I kept making it.”

“And what was that?”

“To stay after he hit me.”

The smile dropped from Steve’s face and he felt suddenly sober again. “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m…sorry. I didn’t—”

To his surprise, Darcy laughed lightly. “Well I hope you didn’t know,” she assured him. “I like to think I don’t put out ‘damaged goods’ vibes anymore.”

“You don’t.”

She bit her lip again and raked her nails through her long dark curls. “Anyway. He went too far one night and now he’s in prison and I’m here and the whole town knows what he looks like if he ever gets out and decides to show up.” She blinked and shook her head. “And holy fuck, I’m sorry,” she laughed again. “That was…just… _way_ too much—”

Steve reached for her hand without thinking about it. “No,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t. It was—refreshing,” he blurted out before he corrected himself. “Not—I mean, not that it happened, but—”

She squeezed his hand, her smile softened to something less embarrassed. “I know what you mean,” she said softly. “You’re easy to talk to.”

“So are you,” he admitted, dropping his eyes to where she’d turned her hand to lace her fingers with his.

“So…” Darcy ducked her head and met his eyes. “Talk to me. Tell me something about you that I couldn’t find out from reading your LinkedIn profile. Which—” she added, holding up a finger along with her glass, “it must be said—is a very odd platform to be the _only_ social media presence you have.”

He let out a choked laugh. “I don’t like social media.”

“Nobody _likes_ social media,” she countered. “But most of us have it anyway. So,” she cleared her throat and shuffled to be closer, coaxing Bossy off the couch in the process. “Tell me what’s not on LinkedIn.” Her blue eyes darted around the room. “Tell me why you really bought this house.”

His mouth opened and closed again as he followed her gaze, over the walls that needed new drywall and the trim that needed to be painted. “I think I’m running away,” he said finally.

Darcy smiled slightly. “Now we’re talkin’.” She lifted her eyebrows encouragingly. “What are you running away from?”

He let out a deep breath through pursed lips. “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Take your pick.”

“Family or a relationship?”

“Yes,” he nodded once.

She grinned. “What about your family?”

Steve shifted a little in place. “Uh, my mom died…about a year and a half ago.”

It was her turn to sober. “Oh, no, I’m so sorry,” she said, dropping his hand to cover her mouth before she asked timidly, “Do—do you have other family?”

He shook his head. “No, not really. It was just the two of us but,” he rushed on, seeing the way her brow had furrowed. “I mean, I’m not _alone_ ,” he insisted. “I’ve got Sam and Bucky and—” _And this big, empty house, two hours away from them and everyone and everything else I’ve ever known._ The words lingered on his tongue but saying them would feel like some kind of admission. Some proof that he didn’t know what he was doing there. That he didn’t know why he’d purchased this house.

“And…a…wife?” Darcy prompted, surprising him, wanting to know more of his sob story. “Girlfriend? Husband?”

He smiled. “Girlfriend,” he agreed before he corrected himself. “Well. Ex-girlfriend.”

Darcy narrowed her eyes. “Was she an ex before or after your mom died?”

“After.”

“How soon after?”

“Six months? Give or take?”

She let out a theatrical gasp. “No. Why? What did you do?”

He actually laughed—something he’d never thought to do when thinking about the unceremonious way Peggy had walked out of his life. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Probably a lot but she didn’t…” he blew out another breath. “She didn’t exactly leave me a list.”

“What’d she say?”

“Uh,” he frowned, pretending to try to remember. “I’m sorry? I love you but I love someone else more—” he shrugged. “Something like that.”

Something exactly like that. Worse than Peggy bluntly informing him that she’d met someone else was that he’d barely noticed she was gone. Too buried in dealing with wrapping up the loose ends of his mother’s life. Too distracted trying to lose the rest of his attention in his work so he didn’t have to think about it anymore. Too obvious that they hadn’t really been a couple for a lot longer than he’d wanted to admit.

“Damn,” she clucked her tongue. “No wonder you ran away.”

“Hey,” he drained the rest of his glass and set it on the table. “Where in Brooklyn Heights were you living?”

“Hicks Street.”

He blinked. “Hicks and what?”

“Cranberry…” she said slowly. “Why? Where did _you_ move from?”

Steve felt his lips slide upward into a half-smile. “Poplar Street.”

She let out another of her bark-like laughs. “Get the fuck outta here.”

“It’s my house,” he laughed. “You get the fuck outta here.”

“We were practically neighbors already!” she exclaimed and took a last sip from her glass and set it on the coffee table next to his. When she sat back on the couch, she was suddenly much closer than she’d been a minute ago. Practically sitting in his lap. Close enough that his eyes kept darting from hers to her lips, unable to focus on much other than how full they were. How close to his. The faded lipstick she hadn’t reapplied had still stained them red. “I think I prefer this neighborly arrangement better though,” she said softly, drawing his eyes back to hers again.

Steve smiled, waiting for his usual stammering shyness to appear. To do or say something that would kill this unexpected mood. For something to tell him it wasn’t a good idea for Darcy to be so close to him, invading his senses with her perfume and her soft brown curls brushing against his arm, and her lips— “I think I do, too,” he heard himself say as he reached up and tucked her hair behind her ear.

Her mouth twitched into a brief grin as she leaned in the rest of the way. “Good,” she breathed against his lips before she let him pull her the rest of the way down and kissed him.

According to his memory, it had been seven years since his last _first_ kiss. Any time he’d thought about his breakup with Peggy—about the loneliness that cropped up at the strangest times and the things he’d find himself missing about her with no warning—the thing he had dreaded and feared the most was the idea of having to do all these firsts again. First dates and first kisses and first times having sex—it was always so awkward. Stumbling. Shy. The uneasy dance of learning someone new and blindly hoping it wasn’t terrible for all parties involved.

But Darcy was none of those things. She was soft and sweet and immediately comfortable. She leaned into him and let him pull her all the way onto his lap, her knees bracketing his hips as his hands drifted down her sides to rest safely on her waist. Her lips parted beneath his and she moved against him, warm and pliant like they’d been made to fit together.

There was something intoxicating about the way she responded to his every touch. When his hands moved downward to grip her hips, she rolled them against his, shutting down any higher thinking as his cock twitched with interest. She seemed more than willing to let him be in control, shifting in his lap so he could reach back to squeeze her ass through her jeans.

She hummed approvingly against his mouth before she broke away, breathing hard, and Steve pushed her hair over her shoulder to drop a kiss to her neck, just below her ear, wanting to hear that sound again. The sound he got instead was even better. A soft moan she tried to smother between her lips, so it came out as more of a whimper. He squeezed her ass again, pulling her down again onto his now-obvious erection.

Darcy’s nails ran over his shoulders and down his chest before she flattened her palm over his heart and pushed lightly. “Wait,” she breathed. “Hang on.”

He pulled back from her neck immediately and dragged his hands back to her hips. “What’s wrong?”

She bit her lip and her cheeks turned pleasantly pink. “With you?” she asked and shook her head. “Not a damn thing as far as I can tell.”

He searched her expression, looking for some clue as to what she was asking for. “You want to stop?” he asked, even though that seemed pretty obvious.

“Want to?” she repeated. “No, not really. But, um,” she glanced down at the hand that was still on his chest. “That bourbon hit me harder than I thought it would.” She let out a quiet, embarrassed laugh. “I’m a little too drunk for this.”

Steve smiled and pushed her hair out of her eyes. She was so _cute_ , he thought when she looked up at him again and he could clearly spot the gap between her front teeth. “Okay,” he said with a roll of his shoulder. Because it _was_ okay. He hadn’t expected any part of the last five minutes when Darcy had told him she was coming over with pizza. He wasn’t complaining. “Do you want to watch a movie or something?”

Her smile softened and she nodded. “Yeah, that sounds nice. Will you walk me home after?” she asked, surprising him. “I don’t like the trees around here after dark.”

“Of course,” he said easily. She turned around and reached for the remote on the coffee table. He watched as she scrambled to the other side of the couch and shut off the light after she’d turned on the tv, bathing them in the blue light of the guide screen. “Do you have something in mind?”

She’d taken her large glasses off earlier and had to squint at the screen. “What time is it?” she asked before she answered herself. “Okay, only ten. Good; we didn’t miss it.”

He followed the blinking cursor on the screen while she jumped through all the channels he never watched that were somehow, inexplicably, included in his cable package until she finally stopped on one of the movie channels that had been playing a Tom Hanks marathon for the last twenty-four hours. He laughed as she selected it and the settled back onto the couch, leaning against him like a pillow. “ _Money Pit?_ ” he choked. “Really?”

Darcy snuggled into him like this was exactly the way she curled up every night. Without a breath of awkwardness between them. She looked up and grinned. “I thought you might find it educational and relevant in this new chapter of your life.”

They laughed their way through the movie, Darcy cackled especially hard when the chimney dropped through the dumbwaiter and Steve thought he heard her sniffle once toward the end, when Walter and Anna are standing on opposites sides of the finished foyer. She held his hand as he walked her back through their shared yard and stretched up on her tiptoes to brush her lips to his beneath her porchlight.

“You’re not mad that I changed my mind, are you?” she asked when she’d sank back down.

Steve smiled again and anchored his hands at her full hips. “Of course not.”

“Good,” she said with a nod and pulled him down for another kiss. “Because honestly,” she grinned between brief, teasing brushes of her lips to his. “I’m worth the wait.”

His grin doubled. “I had a feeling,” he assured her.

“Okay,” she pushed him away lightly after he’d traded her a last, quick kiss. “Stop being charming. I’m going to bed. Good night.”

He laughed lightly. “Good night, Darcy.”

He waited until she’d shut the door and he heard the deadbolt lock before he turned and made his way back home.

With his head full of thoughts of Darcy—her ocean of sweet-smelling curls and addictive kisses and all the little sounds she made when his ran his hands over her soft curves—he didn’t notice the upstairs curtains swish as the figure in his bedroom window disappeared from view.


	3. Chapter 3

iii.

He didn’t see Darcy the next day. He heard her car pull away early in the morning while he was setting up drop cloths to paint the bathroom and didn’t hear her come back until much later, when he was already too buried in his actual work to wander outside to say hello.

Not that he didn’t think about her. Because he did. Most of the day. About how easy it had been to kiss her, how clearly she indicated how she felt and what she wanted and what she liked and didn’t like. He caught a glimpse of himself in the newly installed bathroom mirror, the stupid smile he couldn’t get off his face, and shook his head, forcing himself to get back to work.

He finished his biggest project early on Friday morning and submitted it to the client, taking great pleasure in wiping it from the _Active_ column on the whiteboard in his office before he decided to do a load of laundry.

To his great relief, the new washer and dryer had been installed on time and having them upstairs saved him a trip into the basement—which was still locked after almost three weeks. He rounded up his dirty clothes and stripped the sheets from his bed, throwing them in for good measure. While everything washed and then tumbled around the dryer, he went downstairs and straightened up the kitchen and the living room.

He stopped at the sight of the thick brown folder on the coffee table. The notes Darcy had brought him from the historical society. If he was being honest, he’d admit that he’d forgotten about them as soon as Darcy had started running her tongue along her bottom lip and inching her way across the couch into his lap.

Steve sat down on the couch and opened the file. Everything inside was a photocopy, but Darcy had taken care to make everything clear as possible. The first few pages were boring—the property lines, a deed of sale for the land from the mid eighteen hundreds—he flipped past them without paying too close attention. It wasn’t until he’d passed over a few more pages that a copy of a newspaper front page caught his eye.

_Fisk Trial: Defense Enters Not-Guilty Plea_

He frowned and set the rest of the folder on the table, squinting at the headline and the date. June 13th, 1978. _35-year-old Wilson Fisk entered a plea of not-guilty at Friday’s arraignment in the murder of—_

_BEEP_

Steve’s head shot up at the interruption; his heart hammered in his chest for a few beats before he realized that it was just the dryer. His sheets were done.

Feeling more than a little stupid for being so jumpy, he put the papers all back in the folder and stood up, rubbing at his eyes before he headed upstairs. He passed Bossy, snoozing in the hallway, her body curled around an old sock of his that she’d stolen and taken to carry from room to room. He stopped and gave her head a scratch, earning him a soft purr and a little chirp of thanks before he returned to his bedroom.

The sheets were soft and warm when he pulled them out of the dryer. He wrangled the fitted sheet back onto the mattress without too much difficulty and then tossed the flat sheet up like a parachute, letting it drift down onto the bed and—

Steve stopped again and smiled. There was a lump in the center of the bed now. Between the sheets. He laughed and leaned forward to tap Bossy, wondering how fast she had to move for him to not have seen her even come into the room before she jumped up to play with the fabric. From under the top sheet, she jolted and turned her head in his direction. He drummed his fingers and laughed when she sped toward them like a torpedo. They played this game for another minute before he heard her claws digging into the bottom sheet. “Okay,” he laughed. “That’s enough. Come on,” he went to give her a nudge when a sound interrupted him.

A curious chirp of a meow.

Bossy’s meow. Coming from behind him.

He frowned and turned slowly, confusion giving way to that now-familiar thrum of dread pounding in his throat.

Bossy was standing in the doorway, her head cocked to one side, staring at him. Only, he realized after a moment, she wasn’t staring at him. She was staring just behind him.

He turned back just as slowly and felt the air forced from his lungs. There was something beneath his top sheet, but it was no longer the size of a cat. It was the size of a person. The size of a man. Crouched with covers over his body, as if he was playing with a child. Steve was frozen in fear as he watched the mattress dip under the weight of whoever it was— _what_ ever it was. Through the top sheet he could see the outline of fingers reaching slowly toward him, gathering the fabric inch by inch.

He drew in a shuddering breath and screwed up all the courage he could muster. He took hold of the sheet, telling himself he was prepared for whatever was hiding—whatever had been toying with him since he’d moved in—and he pulled hard, yanking them completely off the bed.

There was nothing.

Nothing but an empty mattress with a rumpled fitted sheet.

Steve let out a loud exhale and forced himself to let go of the top sheet. Confusion and relief swept out of him in a weak laugh as he flexed his fingers, trying to restore to blood flow after they’d been clenched so tightly.

And then the door to his bathroom, the door to his closet, and both open windows all slammed shut at once.

***

The notes and papers Darcy had brought him were spread out all across the small table at The Stark Raving Diner while Steve picked at a tuna melt. He didn’t want to be in his house anymore. Not until he could wrap his head around what was going on, and not when it felt like there was something else there. Something that now felt unfriendly. And worse, like it was playing with him.

He sighed and pushed his hair back. He felt crazy even thinking about these things—but he had no other explanation for what had been going on. He knew he _wasn’t_ crazy. And he knew he’d seen things—felt things—that he couldn’t explain.

And, as it turned out, a lot of terrible things had happened in his house over the last two hundred years.

He’d finished the article he’d started at home. The one from ’78 that outlined how Wilson Fisk had entered a plea of not-guilty while on trial for murdering his wife. There were other articles from that whole year, starting with Fisk’s arrest in February regarding the disappearance of his wife, Vanessa. Then another flurry of them in March when he was officially charged with her murder when they found her body in a nearby lake. And finally, several reporting on the trial itself where the defense had successfully argued for the insanity plea and Wilson Fisk was sentenced to life at the state psychiatric facility thirty miles away. It wasn’t his fault, he had told the jury. His wife was a witch. She hadn’t started out that way, but she’d been seduced by the devil and he couldn’t get her back. He _had_ to kill her, he’d insisted through tears on the witness stand, she was trying to steal his soul.

Wilson and Vanessa Fisk were the last people to own Steve’s house.

Four other families had lived in his house before the Fisk’s moved in in 1974. No one had stayed for more than a few years, there had been long stretches of vacancy in between each tenant, and the house itself seemed to attract tragedy.

He found an article about the disappearance of the teenaged daughter of Edward and Elizabeth Hoffman in 1956—it was determined she’d run away, despite her parents claim that she would never do something like that. Another about Moira Schultz—the wife of the town’s only doctor in 1918 who died of Spanish flu, despite not showing any symptoms.

A hand on his shoulder made him jump and he turned, surprised to see Darcy standing behind him, looking curious. She smiled tentatively. “Hey friend.”

He relaxed and exhaled heavily. “Hey.”

“What’s up?” she asked, not bothering to wait for an invitation to drop down across from him in the small booth.

Steve offered a wry smile. “My house is haunted.”

Darcy winced. “Yeah it is.”

He scoffed. “You knew that?”

She looked at him. “Everybody knows that.”

“The bank didn’t mention it,” he muttered and rubbed at his eyes.

“Well no shit,” she laughed. “They’ve been trying to unload that land for fifty years.” She looked down at the scattered news articles. “Read about Old Man Fisk, huh?”

Steve looked back. “So this is like…public somewhere? The fact that my house is haunted?”

“Only to the townies,” she shrugged before she seized the photocopy of the coverage of Fisk’s plea. Her eyes bugged slightly. “He was only _thirty-five_?” she wheezed. “What the fuck were we doing calling him _Old Man_ Fisk all these years?” She flipped the paper over and shook her head. “That was bracing.”

“Not really the part of the story that’s keeping me up at night,” Steve countered under his breath.

Darcy nudged his shin under the table with the toe of her boot. “Hey,” her tone softened. “It’s an ugly story but it’s just…” she moved her shoulder again. “I mean, it’s just a bad marriage gone really wrong. Vanessa wasn’t really a witch and her husband said whatever he had to avoid going to prison.” She frowned again and tilted her head to one side. “But this isn’t…” she flipped the news article back over and pointed to Fisk’s pre-trial photo. “The bank legally had to tell you about this, didn’t they?”

“Vanessa didn’t die in the house,” he said flatly. “According to the reports.”

 _And I didn’t ask,_ he could have said. But he didn’t want to admit that—yet another thing he’d failed to do in his rush to acquire his house as quickly as possible. He’d asked for nothing on the history of the house itself, the land, the previous owners. Nothing.

He hadn’t even thought about it until he’d moved in.

His frown deepened. Why hadn’t he asked any questions?

Why had he bought that house?

Across the table, Darcy folded her hands in front of her and studied him. After a moment, her usual easy smile slipped from her lips. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?” she asked softly. “There’s really…I mean—you’re really…”

“Seeing ghosts?” he finished for her, hating the words as they fell from his lips. “I don’t…” he sighed. “Maybe.”

“What have you been seeing?”

When he looked up, he was surprised to find that Darcy wasn’t joking anymore. She wasn’t looking at him like he was crazy or like she was waiting for the punchline.

“I don’t know,” he lied again and shook his head. How was he going to explain the figure at the foot of his bed? The thing he’d seen under the sheets that morning? The way the hair on the back of his neck stood on end when he walked past the basement door. “I feel like I’m losing it.”

“Steve,” she reached across the table and put her hand over his. “I’ve lived in a creaky old house by myself for awhile now. It’s easy to feel like something else is going on.” She offered him a small smile. “But I promise I won’t think you’re crazy.”

“I just keep hoping there’s some kind of logical explanation here somewhere,” he gestured to the table full of photocopies. “You said you got all this from the historical society?”

“That’s all Carol would give me,” she clarified, accepting the conversation’s change in course. “She said there was a bunch of stuff that she had to send to the state historical museum in Albany, though. But I think that was all to do with the foundations and the original town charter?” Her face wrinkled, as if trying to remember. “And there were a few things that I couldn’t copy because they’re too old.”

“How old?”

Darcy moved her shoulders. “Sixteen hundreds old?”

Steve felt his confusion double. “Sixteen hundreds?” he repeated before he started shuffling the papers again. “I thought my house was built in 1890?”

“The house, yeah,” she agreed. “But it was built on the original foundation—from the 1640s—when Alexander Pierce lived there.”

He blinked. “Pierce? As in—”

“As in…settled the town, named it Pierce Landing, was some beloved leader and everything in the whole area is still named after him and his children even four hundred years later?” she filled in quickly and smiled. “Yeah, that Alexander Pierce. We’re living on what used to be his farm. And your house is built over the same foundations as his. I think mine was near the summer kitchen? Or something like that. I can't remember.” Her fingers danced over the papers, shifting and moving them around. “I guess all that stuff is still at the historical society.”

“And if I went there and asked your friend Carol,” he said, feeling a faint hint of hope that he might be on the road to some answers. “She’d give it to me?”

Darcy looked skeptical. “She _would,_ ” she said after a moment’s consideration. “But she’d do it a lot faster if you had me with you.”

Despite everything, Steve felt himself smile slowly. “Why are you so invested in my haunted house?”

“I love that house,” she said easily. “It means a lot to me.”

“That so?”

“For one thing, I lost my virginity there.”

He choked out a laugh. “You’re joking.”

“Definitely not joking,” she promised. “I took my boyfriend there on a dare when I brought him home from college during fall break. Junior year.”

“How romantic,” he said dryly.

“Most romantic ninety seconds of my life up until that point, thank you very much,” she said, and he laughed again. A teenager with dark hair pulled up in a ponytail walked past their table and Darcy reached out a hand to stop her. “Cassie? Can you tell Tony that order I placed is to go?”

The girl nodded and looked at the food Steve had barely touched. “Do you want a box?”

He glanced at his plate and shook his head. He didn’t like to waste food, but there was only so much a microwave could do for pre-melted cheese and formerly-grilled bread on a reheat. “I’m okay, thanks.” He waited until she’d left before he looked back at Darcy. “What’s the other thing?”

She quirked an eyebrow. “What other thing?”

“You said, ‘for one thing’ about my house,” he reminded. “What’s the other reason you’re so invested?” he asked, even though he thought he already knew. It would still be nice to hear it.

The very tops of Darcy’s cheeks turned a pleasant shade of soft pink. “Because it’s _your_ house now,” she said quietly and offered him a smile that was just on the edge of shy. “And I like you.”

Steve felt his heart stutter in his chest. “I like you too.”

The doors of the historical society were closed and locked by the time they had made their way up the three blocks from the diner. Always closed on Fridays, according to the sign in the window. Darcy’s full lips pouted as she gave the doors a cursory pull just in case. “Okay, new plan,” she suggested and pointed to the library across the street.

They couldn’t get anything from the library related to his house in particular, but Darcy successfully navigated him to the local history section, and he checked out two books on Alexander Pierce and the founding of Pierce Landing. “Oh, but if you have time and you’re interested,” the librarian—an older woman with laugh lines and little streaks of silver her in her long dark hair, the name plate read May Parker, Head Librarian—leaned over the desk as she handed him his books and his new library card. “I saw that Bleeker St Exchange has a few books that were just donated about the Pierce family and the witch trials.”

Beside him, Darcy’s ears perked up. “The Salem witch trials?”

May shook her head. “No, the Pierce Landing witch trials.”

“Oh,” she seemed far less interested. “Right.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “There were witches here?”

Darcy shook her head. “There weren’t any witches anywhere,” she reminded him. “It was just kids spreading lies in Salem and here it was…” she trailed off and bit her lip. “I don’t know,” she looked back at May. “Religious idiots?”

May shrugged. “Misogyny?”

“Ah,” Steve nodded. “The classics.”

“You said those books were at Bleeker Street?” Darcy repeated.

May nodded. “He was only just setting them out yesterday,” she said cheerfully. “I’m sure they’ll still be there.”

They were.

Bleeker Street Exchange was a little storefront on the main drag that was bursting at the seams with antiques. Furniture, jewelry, books, records, toys and clothes filled every square inch. There was no order to it. The whole place smelled like dust and old binding glue and if Steve hadn’t outgrown the horrible asthma and allergies he’d had as a child, he knew he wouldn’t have been able to breathe for more than a few minutes inside. The owner was a tall man who looked to be in his mid-forties. His hair was thick and combed back and his temples were steely gray; the severe comb of his hair went well with the coldly curious gaze that followed them around the store.

As suspicious as he appeared, the proprietor knew exactly which books Darcy was asking for and exactly where to find them. He led her to the back of the store while Steve stayed out front, sifting through a table stuffed with boxes of a soft, well-read postcards, a pile of silk scarves and—

“Find anything good?” Darcy asked, startling him as the silk slipped from his fingers and the pile shifted from the table to the ground.

He was shaking his head as he collected them and stood up, only to stop dead at what had been hiding beneath the material. “Oh Christ,” he muttered and picked up the old game box anyway.

_The mystifying oracle…Wonderful talking board_

The image on the front of the box was cracked with age and it felt soft and brittle in his hands, but the word _OUIJA_ was plain as day. Darcy reached for it before he could put it back. “Darcy, no,” he said shaking his head.

“Oh, come on,” she scoffed, taking it out of his hands. “This is a sign.”

“A sign of what? Us messing around with something completely stupid?”

“It’s not completely stupid,” she said, sounding hurt. “It’s harmless. But if there _is_ something hanging around your house, maybe they’ll talk to us.”

“Or maybe we’ll just be two grown adults pushing a piece of plastic around trying to scare each other.”

She looked confused. “Why would I try to scare you?” she asked. “That’s not cool.”

“I just…” he stopped. “I don’t know. I don’t believe in this stuff, is all.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “Then what’s the harm?”

“I close at three on Fridays!” the owner of the shop called from behind the register. “If that helps you make up your mind any faster.”

Darcy rolled her eyes and tucked the board game under her arm. “Come on,” she said, slipping her free hand into his. “I promise to keep it at my house after we play with it.”

She bought the board. He bought the books. The shopkeeper locked the door behind them.

***

“Apologies for the candles,” Darcy said as she kicked her boots off at his door an hour later. She’d gone home to eat her take-out, feed her cats, and collect a few necessities (her words) before they started messing around with the Ouija board. “But all I have are basic-bitch fall scents.” She peered into the woven grocery bag. “Apple pie, pumpkin spice, and autumn breeze,” she looked up and shrugged.

Steve shrugged back. “Those…all sound nice.”

She grinned. “Basic bitch it is.” She stopped and peered out onto the front porch again. “Bossy’s just hanging out on the steps, do you want me to bring her in?”

His stomach twisted and he shook his head. “I tried earlier,” he said. “She didn’t want to.” She’d nearly scratched him, struggling to get free when he’d carried her close to the front door. He didn’t blame her—he didn’t particularly want to be inside either. “She’ll come in when she gets hungry.”

“Okay,” Darcy opened the storm door and kissed the air a few times. “Stay warm, baby kitty,” she said and waited a few seconds before she closed the door again. She set her bag on the couch and crossed the room, standing in front of Steve before he realized it. “Hey,” she said softly and let her hands rest on his hips.

“Hey,” he echoed and took her face in his hands to pull her in for a long, slow kiss.

She stretched up onto her toes and slid her hands up his chest, molding herself against him with a small hum of satisfaction. He let one hand sink into her thick hair while the other moved to the small of her back. She pulled away slowly, her eyes staying closed as she dropped back to the ground and her dark lashes fluttered when she looked up at him again. “So…where do you want to do this?”

He blinked. “Uh—” he was distracted for a moment by the way Darcy’s teeth pressed into her bottom lip. “Depends on what you’re talking about.”

She giggled and took another step back, looking over her shoulder. “Coffee table?”

Steve sighed. “Good a place as any to play a board game.”

“Don’t be grouchy,” she admonished lightly, tugging his hand to follow her as she sat on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. “I just want to try it and if it doesn’t work then we can stop and move on to something more fun.” She reached back and grabbed her bag; she set the worn cardboard box in the center of the table and unloaded six candles around the edges of the table before she looked up. “Do you have a lighter?”

His face wrinkled in thought. “I have…matches?”

“Those work.”

By the time he returned from rummaging in his kitchen drawers, Darcy had set up the board and placed the plastic planchette in the center of the letters. To her right was a small, yellowed pad of paper and a golf pencil. “I have such a bad feeling about this,” he stated as he folded his legs beneath him and sat down across from her.

“Come on,” she laughed. “Five questions, tops and then we’ll play something else.” She rose up onto her knees and leaned across the table to brush her lips to his. “Indulge me.”

He smiled and relented. “Okay,” he sighed again. “Five questions. Tops.”

“Get the lights,” she said and began lighting the candles.

Steve complied and resituated himself. “Alright. How do we do this?”

“Fingers on the planchette,” she instructed before she took hers off to point at him. “And _don’t_ push it.”

“I won’t,” he smiled. “I don’t want to give you any ideas that this is working.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and took a deep breath to resettle herself. Steve copied her and placed his fingers on the planchette. She cleared her throat lightly and moved the planchette slowly to the word ‘Hello’. “If there are any spirits who’d like to peacefully communicate with us,” she said carefully, reading from the back of the box lid. “We’re here to listen.”

“For five questions,” Steve reiterated under his breath.

“Shh,” she giggled before she coughed again. “So…are there any spirits here?”

Beneath his fingers, the planchette began to move. He jolted and watched as it drifted over to _Yes._ His gut twisted as the memory of the figure beneath the sheet, of the man at the foot of his bed resurfaced. He didn’t want to do this. Every cell in his body was telling him to stop. To throw the stupid thing in the fireplace and light a match. But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was, “Are you friendly?”

The planchette moved away from _Yes_ but only for a second before it returned. Across the table, he watched for a sign that Darcy had been the one to move it, but she was only staring at their fingers warily, her eyes distrustful. Before he could say anything else, the plastic piece between them was pushed to the opposite side of the board.

_No._

A chill ran down his body like he’d swallowed an ice cube.

“Is there only one of you?” Darcy asked, her voice having lost its teasing edge. Again, the planchette moved away from the word and back again.

_No._

“Okay,” Steve said firmly. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Okay,” Darcy said immediately. She met his gaze and they started pushing the piece toward the _Goodbye_ at the bottom of the board.

Steve’s fingers suddenly felt cold. Heavy, like a freezing weight had been pressed to them. The planchette stopped in the middle of the board. Trying to keep his heart from hammering in his throat, he tried to slide it toward _Goodbye_ again, but it refused to move.

“What are you doing?” Darcy asked in a small voice. “Just put it on ‘goodbye’ and we can be done.”

“I’m not—”

Their hands were yanked together across the board, back to the top right corner.

_No._

Darcy opened her mouth to speak, but their hands started moving again. Over letters this time.

“S…T…I…L…L…” she read aloud as the planchette darted across the board with firm, decisive strokes. “H…E…R…E.” Her eyes were wide when she looked up at him. “Still here?” she repeated. “Who is still here?”

“Okay, for real,” Steve said again. “I’m done fucking around with this—”

The planchette moved again.

“S…A…R…A…H…”

He felt his blood run cold. His stomach drop somewhere into the floor. “That’s not funny,” he said softly.

But Darcy didn’t hear him. She kept reading the letters as the planchette spelled out its message over and over again.

_Sarah Rogers._

_Still here._

“Seriously, Darcy, it’s not fucking funny,” he snapped, trying in vain to pull his hands from the planchette. “Stop it.”

“Stop what?” she demanded, raising her voice. “I don’t know what this means.”

“I don’t know what the joke is, but having this thing spell out my dead mother’s name is—”

“I’m not doing this!” she insisted. The piece kept moving.

_Sarah Rogers_

_Still here_

“And how would I know what your mother’s name is?” she added, her voice lifting another octave. It wasn’t anger this time, he realized with another chill. It was fear.

The planchette moved faster. Only spelling two words.

_Still here_

_Still here_

_Still here_

“Okay, if you’re not doing this,” Darcy said, her breathing fast, her eyes wide in the dim candlelight, “and I’m not doing this, then on the count of three, we pull our hands off as hard as we can,” she looked up. “Deal?”

He nodded swiftly. Rage and grief and terror bubbling together somewhere in the back of his throat.

“One…two…three.”

The planchette was halfway to the letter ‘h’ again when they wrenched their hands away. It hurt. Like pulling his fingers from being shut in a car door. He fell backward, away from the table at the same time Darcy’s back hit the couch, her head snapping back like she’d been shoved.

Breathing hard, they pulled themselves back to sitting upright and stared at the planchette. It sat in the center of the board, spinning slowly, counterclockwise. The sound of the resin against the cardboard a long, slow _scraaaaaatch_ until it finally stopped.

Steve forced his eyes up and around the room. In the abrupt silence, he could hear his heart pounding, Darcy’s shallow breaths matching his own. He swallowed hard and took a deep breath. “Mom?”

He waited for the relief of feeling her nearby. For some sign that she really was still there, somehow, watching over him, keeping him from harm. But there was nothing. The stillness in the room only chilled him more. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck permanently raised.

He heard Darcy timidly clear her throat. “Sarah?”

The mirror above the fireplace dropped from the wall and hit the floor, shattering into a million pieces as all the candles were extinguished at once.

***

The sound of kibble hitting a bowl barely registered as Steve sat on Darcy’s couch, his head in his hands, his mind still racing. “Here you go, sweetie,” he heard Darcy say as she set the bowl down in front of Bossy. “Don’t worry about the Rat Pack, they’ve already eaten—they’ll leave you alone.” He looked up to see her scratch Bossy’s ears before she straightened up and crossed to the living room. “You sure I can’t get you anything?”

He shook his head. “I’m fine.”

“Really?” she asked as she dropped down onto the couch next to him. “And just how the hell are you managing that?” He didn’t say anything, so she continued. “Because I’m freaking out, Steve. What just happened back there?” she motioned to the window that faced his house. “That was entirely not normal.”

“I told you I didn’t want to fuck around with that thing,” he reminded quietly.

She scoffed. “Yeah; I thought you meant because you didn’t believe in it, not because some _Poltergeist_ shit was _already_ happening inside your house.”

It had taken some doing, but Steve had finally told Darcy what had been going on since he’d moved in. Everything. From the first day with the feeling in the basement to the figure messing with him that morning. He’d choked it all up and out as they stood in her kitchen trying to make sense of what they'd just experienced.

He hadn’t felt any better when he’d finished.

She set her hand on his arm, pulling his attention up to look at her. “Steve,” she said softly, surprising him with the gentleness of her voice. “You can talk to me. Whatever you’re thinking or feeling…just…”

“I don’t want it to be her,” he said abruptly.

Darcy blinked. “Your mom?”

He nodded and felt an inconvenient lump rise in his throat. “Whatever’s in that house—whatever’s going on—” he shook his head. “It can’t be her.”

“Why not?”

“Because she was _good_ ,” his voice cracked on the word. “She was just sweet and good, and she would never do this to me,” he insisted. The thought rolled a fresh wave of fear and dread and confusion in his gut. “She’d never want me to be this—” he stopped and shook his head.

Darcy’s hand slid down his arm and her fingers curled around his palm. “This what?”

“Scared.”

He looked up and met her eyes. Wide and blue and entirely trusting, believing what he was saying, what he’d been experiencing. She rolled her bottom lip between her teeth and let her other hand drift up to push his hair away from his eyes. “I’m scared too,” she said softly. 

Her fingertips were cool against his skin. He wanted to close his eyes and lean into her touch. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “This is just—” he looked down again. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“You’re _not_ going crazy,” Darcy insisted firmly. “Or, if you are, it’s contagious and I’m crazy too.” With his eyes still downcast, he watcher her nails trail over his wrist again and return to his palm. “You’re not crazy,” she said again and squeezed his hand. “But you _are_ safe here, with me. And whatever’s going on, I’m not going to let you deal with it on your own.”

He let out a long breath and closed his hand around hers. She felt like a lifeline. “So now what?” he asked after he felt like he could breathe again.

“Well,” Darcy’s head tilted to one side. “I guess if this was a show on the CW, we’d crank up the research machine and pull an all-nighter to figure out who or what is haunting your house and how to get rid of it but—”

Steve interrupted her with a shake of his head. “I don’t think I can focus on anything like that right now,” he admitted.

“No, me either,” she agreed before she stood up and pulled on his hand to bring him with her. He kept his fingers twisted with hers, following blindly while she led him through the living room. “But personally, I always think better after I have a shower,” she said, coming to a stop at the foot of her stairs. She stepped up onto the first one and turned back around to face him. It was darker in this corner, but Steve could see a faint blush on her cheeks, now that she’d made it so they were the same height. “Why don’t you come with me?” she suggested softly. “I think we’d both feel better.”

Suddenly Steve had never wanted anything more in his entire life. He closed the distance between them and took her face in his hands. She leaned into him the moment his lips touched hers, keeping her hands at his hips, curling her fingers against the fabric of his pants. For a moment, everything that had happened at his house melted away. His focus faded to just the warmth of Darcy’s kiss, just her soft skin beneath his hands, just the smothered little hum she let out against his lips that went straight to his cock.

“Come on,” she said as she pulled away and took him by the hand again.

She turned on the water in her shower first and let it run, steam slowly filling the small tiled room while she pulled off her clothes without hesitation. She piled her dark curls up on top of her head and secured the bun with the hairband around her wrist. With the steam and the lights, Steve barely had a chance to appreciate what she was doing before she’d already stepped into the stall and beneath the water. After a second, she popped her head back out and smiled. “I meant _with me_ with me,” she said and held out her hand. “This is not a spectator sport.”

He shucked out of his clothes quickly, tossing them in a pile next to hers, and let her pull him beneath the spray. She let him stand under the water first while she rubbed a bar of sweet-smelling soap over a loofa and began to cover herself in sudsy bubbles. Maybe it was rude, but Steve couldn’t stop staring. She was _beautiful_. All creamy skin and soft curves, wide hips, and full thighs.

He blinked and realized that she was holding the sponge out to him. “Do my back?” she asked, already turning around when he took it from her. If he wasn’t already rock hard, that hopeful little lilt in her voice would have done it for sure. He shook his head and drew the loofa up her spine in a long, slow swipe. He pushed it over her skin for a few strokes before he set it on the ledge and brought his hands up to her shoulders, pushing his thumbs into the tense muscles there. She moaned quietly and rolled her head to one side, forcing his attention to the tension on the left side of her neck.

He was about to move to the other side when she reached up and laced her fingers through his, tugging him forward and closing his hands around her breasts. Her nipples hardened between his fingers as he tucked his face into the crook of her neck and kissed the top of her shoulder. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he murmured against her skin, massaging her breasts when she arched her back and pushed herself harder into his hands.

Her legs shifted, parting slightly, and Steve kissed her shoulder again, then her neck, and slid one hand slowly down her belly, giving her plenty of time to stop him if this wasn’t what she wanted. But she didn’t stop him. She sighed when his fingers slipped between her thighs and found her hot and so wet already. He groaned his satisfaction when she reached her hand up and curled it around the back of his neck, keeping him locked against her, his cock nudging into her plush ass, one hand working her breast, the other between her legs.

“Right there,” she breathed as he found and circled her clit. He kissed her neck and then up to her ear, sucking her earlobe between his lips while he dipped his fingers into the arousal pooling at her center and spread it up and around her clit, circling harder and faster. Her nails scraped at the back of his neck and she tried to muffle a moan between her full lips. “Fuck, Steve,” she cried, her other hand scrambled against the wet tile wall. He bore down harder.

“I got ya,” he assured her, dropping his voice to speak low into her ear. He wanted her to come all over his fingers, to hear the kind of sounds she made when she finally let go. He got his wish a minute later when he sucked on her neck and she came with a breathless cry, her body going rigid for one gloriously long moment before she relaxed back against him, limp and pliant and smiling with her eyes closed.

Darcy turned in his arms and pulled him down to kiss her, hot and breathy and desperate as she reached between them for his cock. He groaned into her lips when her grip tightened and she twisted her hand to drag just the right amount of friction up and down. Steve took a step backward, bringing her with him so she was under the spray, the soap sliding down her skin until it had all rinsed away and he could reach back and shut the water off.

She let him go long enough for them both to get out of the shower and barely dry off before she was reaching for him again, letting him lick his way into her mouth while his hands roamed freely over her breasts and down to her hips. He gripped her tightly and hoisted her up, both of them moaning when her legs went around his waist and her ankles locked at the small of his back. “Bedroom,” she muttered, breaking away long enough to catch her breath.

It was the only other room upstairs and her bed took up most of it. Like everything else in her house, it was a mountain of soft. Piles of blankets and pillows and when he dropped them both down onto it, they sank into the comforter like a cloud.

Darcy reached for him again as she rolled so he was on top. She pumped him while she shifted beneath him, his lips still on hers. “Hang on,” he breathed, his brain catching up with his body for a second. “Are you sure?”

“I’m good, Steve,” she assured him, nodding quickly. Her nose brushed his and she smiled. “I’m on the shot,” she crossed her ankles and nudged her heels against his ass. “If you still want to—”

He captured her lips with his again and pushed into her. He broke away from the kiss with a soft moan, wondering if it was possible to lose himself forever in how wet she was, how good she felt, clenching around him, how her mouth fell open a little further with each inch he rocked into her until their hips were flush and his forehead dropped against hers.

“Just stay here for a second,” she begged, her open mouth breathing into his. Though he desperately wanted to move, Steve nodded and stayed still, feeling every inch of her around his cock, gripping and clenching until he couldn’t stand it and reached between them.

Her eyes flew open as soon as he pressed his fingers to her clit and she inhaled sharply. “Is this okay?” he asked in a rough whisper. She nodded feverishly, urging him to go faster and harder as her breathing quickened and her pupils went fat with lust. Her hands clawed at his back as she wriggled beneath him, trying to move her hips in time with his fingers. He felt her clenching harder around him. “You wanna come again?” he asked, unable to help the way his lips twitched into a smile.

“You better stay right there,” she huffed with another breathless laugh around a shaky exhale.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he promised and dropped his head to kiss her again, sucking her tongue onto his mouth and swallowing her moans when a second orgasm broke over her and she pulsed tight and hot around him.

He started to move then, thrusting into her as she came. Delicious tension and friction urging him to go harder when she keened and rolled her hips, digging her nails into his back and sinking her fingers into his ass to keep him right where he was. Gasping and begging him to go faster. He shifted and grabbed hold of the backs of her knees, pulling her with him when he sat back on his heels and hitting her in a different, deeper spot on his next thrust.

Darcy’s hands fisted in her sheets and her back arched as he went as fast as she asked him to, as hard as she wanted until they were both gasping and sweaty and he couldn’t hold on any longer and came with a choked moan and one final deep thrust. He fell forward onto his arms, keeping himself from collapsing his entire weight against her.

His hair fell into his eyes again as he panted hard and watched Darcy run her hands over her face. “Oh my God,” she breathed, slowly blinking the world back into focus.

He exhaled a shaky smile. “That’s what I was gonna say.”

He had only managed to roll onto his back by the time she finished in the bathroom and returned to her bed. She had pulled on a short blue robe that, when it brushed his arm as she climbed back in beside him, felt like a well-worn t-shirt. “We have to do that again,” she said, leaning down to brush her lips to his.

Steve blinked. “Like, right now?” he asked with a slight chuckle. “Cause I’m gonna need a minute.”

“No,” she grinned and kissed him again. She’d pulled her hair from its bun and it tumbled pleasingly over her shoulder and brushed against his chest. “But in general. That was too much fun to be a one-time thing.”

He smiled and let his arm fold up around her, his hand spanning the space between her shoulder blades. “Definitely not a one-time thing,” he agreed.

“We should sleep,” she said softly. “Then we can start ghostbusting first thing in the morning.”

Darcy busied herself with pulling back the sheets and blankets until they could both climb beneath them. She fell asleep quickly and with her head pillowed on his chest as easily and comfortably as if this was how they slept every night.

But while Steve was comfortable, he couldn’t sleep. His mind, which had been perfectly, blissfully quiet while he’d been buried deep inside Darcy, had resumed its racing thoughts and fears, and the terror that had been twisting his gut returned with interest.

He let his fingers drift over the arm Darcy had thrown over his stomach and he listened to her slow, steady breathing. Over and over he tried to close his eyes, thinking he had relaxed enough to sleep. But each time he did, the memory of the Ouija board, of the icy weight over his hands on the planchette and whatever had thrown the mirror off the wall played behind his eyes and he was left staring up at the ceiling replaying the board’s message until the pre-dawn light began to shine through the curtains.

_Sarah Rogers_

_Still here._


	4. Chapter 4

iv.

It was still early when Steve peeled Darcy’s arm away from his midsection and slipped out of bed. He found his clothes in the bathroom and navigated the minefield of sleeping cats in the hallway to get back to the bedroom where Darcy was still sound asleep.

She stirred when he bent and kissed her temple. “I’m going to make some coffee,” he said quietly.

“Okay,” she muttered, pulling the pillow he’d been using down to curl herself around. “Don’t go back to your house without me, though.”

He smiled softly and kissed her again. “I won’t.”

Her coffee maker was easy to use and within minutes, the smell of strong, dark roasted beans wafted through the downstairs while he set the folder of print outs, the books they’d checked out of the library, and the ones from the antique shop all out on the coffee table. “Okay, Alexander Pierce,” he said under his breath as he reached for the first book. “Let’s see what you’re about.”

As it turned out, Alexander Pierce wasn’t about all that much. Law. Order. God. Rules. Standard fare for the leader of a small Protestant colony on the banks of the Delaware river. He founded the town in 1641 with a group of religious fundamentalists from England. By all accounts, he was strict, but fair and well liked among the original settlers. He lived on the land where Steve and Darcy’s houses were currently sitting and served as Pierce Landing’s spiritual and judicial leader until his death in 1660. He was married in 1639 and again in 1647 after the first wife died in childbirth; between the two wives, Pierce had eleven children—eight sons, three daughters.

Steve was skimming.

This was incredibly dull.

He’d leafed through the two biographies and the town’s early history before Darcy made her way downstairs and into the kitchen. She poured two cups of coffee and handed him one as she sat down beside him, still in her robe, and folded one leg beneath her. “Find anything good?”

Her hair was still delightfully messy, and her eyes were still a little puffy from sleep and she looked so comfortable, he wanted to open his arms and let her cuddle into him. He wished they were just reading the paper together on a regular Saturday morning like a normal couple, that he’d just spent the night because he wanted to and not because there was some malevolent spirit making him feel unsafe in his own house.

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Not much. Pierce seems like a classic wet blanket, afraid of his own erection—” Darcy snorted into her coffee “—religious type, but I don’t get anything…y’know…”

“Evil?”

“Yeah,” he frowned.

“Any family connections you might recognize?” she asked, taking him off guard. “Any reason why your mother’s spirit might have followed you to the house, I mean?”

He swallowed hard and shook his head. He didn’t really want to think about the fact that it might actually be his mother behind all this. “No, nothing. I don’t…” his frown deepened. “I don’t even know where to start with that.”

Darcy had picked up another book—the one he’d purchased the day before from Bleeker Street about the witch trials—and flipped to the back. “We could start here,” she suggested, a dark red nail pointing to a name in the index of the book.

Steve leaned over and blinked in surprise. “Sarah Rogers?” he read aloud.

Her fingers danced over the pages again until she found the one in question. “Okay, _this_ Sarah Rogers makes more sense,” she said after she’d read over the paragraph. “Well, sort of.” She cleared her throat. “Among the women wrongfully accused was Sarah Rogers, the town’s only midwife. She was among the first accused after Alexander Pierce himself considered her inability to save his first wife, Margaret, from expiring during childbirth to be the work of the devil.”

“Shit,” he said, a confusing rush of emotions churning in his stomach. He should be relieved, of course. Relieved that whatever had been terrifying him, whatever had been toying with him and whatever had insisted it was _still here_ the night before was _not_ his mother. Was not some tortured version of her kind soul trapped there, tormenting him.

And he was relieved.

Mostly.

But he would have been lying if he’d said there wasn’t also a small part of him that felt a pang like he’d somehow lost her all over again. That she _wasn’t_ there, protecting him, watching over him, trying to keep him safe.

He blinked and shook his head. “When was Sarah executed?”

Darcy frowned and flipped a few pages forward, then back. “Well that’s the thing,” she said slowly. “She…wasn’t.”

“No?”

“No,” she read quickly, her eyes darting from page to page. “She was pardoned before she could go to trial. So she…” her lips looked even fuller when she pursed them in thought. “Well she can’t be in the one in your house either. She didn’t live there. Or die there.” She looked up. “And unless I’m forgetting something, that’s still the recipe for ghost.”

“When we were at the library yesterday,” Steve said before he took a sip of his coffee. “And May brought up the witch trials…how come you lost interest so quickly?”

Darcy shrugged and her robe slipped a little, revealing her pale, rounded shoulder. “The schools around here harp on it a lot in the history curriculum. The fifth graders put on a play that one of the old librarians wrote back in the eighties…it’s a whole thing.”

“Were you in the play, once upon a time?” he asked with a smile tugging at his lips.

“I was,” she nodded proudly. “I was Abigail Wright and got to do her big speech that she gave right before she was executed.” She cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter, righting her robe again. “ _How much innocent blood can you scrub from your hands before you realize the truth, governors? There are no witches here. The only evil in this town is what has poisoned your hearts against your own wives and daughters.”_ She coughed again and fell out of character. “Mom was super proud.”

“Rightfully so,” he grinned before a thought struck him. “Was Sarah Rogers a character in the play?”

“No,” Darcy shook her head. “I’ve never heard her name until now.” She frowned and looked down at the book again. “Which, considering how much they go over all this shit in school around here, is weird.”

“Really weird,” he agreed.

“I didn’t even realize Pierce had pardoned anyone…” she murmured as she read. “And it seems like Sarah was the only one.” Her frown deepened and she turned the page. “Yeah, I mean, all these other names are ones I remember from school. Catherine Price, Isabel Kane, my girl Abigail Wright of course, Mary Dobbs, Margaret Simmons,” her nail trailed over the list of executed women. “Agatha Collier, Rachel Sutter, and Rebecca Banner. They’re all buried together in the back corner of the cemetery.” She looked up, confusion etching lines by her eyes. “That is so weird,” she said again. “What made Sarah Rogers so special?” On the coffee table, her phone lit up with a photo of her with another woman and the name ‘Magic Wand-a”. She grabbed it right away. “Hey witchy woman,” she said cheerfully.

“Hey, what’s with the cryptic texts?” Steve could hear the other woman easily through the phone whether he’d been trying to eavesdrop or not.

“I need your help and you’re going to yell at me when I tell you the whole story,” Darcy said and winced guiltily in Steve’s direction.

“What’d you do?”

“No, you have to promise you’re going to come over and help me before I tell you what I did and what’s going on.”

“Darcy…”

“Wanda…” Darcy mimicked her friend’s exasperated sigh. “Come on. You come over and bring all your sweet witch whammy tools and accessories and I’ll let you yell at me for what I did to make things a lot worse. It’s going to be a big, fun Saturday for all of us.”

“Who’s all of us?” There was skepticism in Wanda’s voice now.

Darcy smiled at him. “You, me, and Steve, my sexy neighbor who is the one who actually needs your help.”

A pause. “Is he the reason I’m going to yell at you?”

“Surprisingly, no,” Darcy laughed. “He’s the embodiment of good decisions where I’m concerned.” She gave him a wink. “Come on,” she begged lightly. “Please? I know you’re curious.”

A heavy sigh came through the phone. “Okay, fine, I can be there in an hour.”

“Perfect. I love you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wanda grumbled. “I love you too.”

Steve waited until she hung up before he raised his eyebrows expectantly. “What’s up?”

“My best friend is coming over to exorcise your house.”

He knew he looked dubious. “She can do that?”

Darcy shrugged. “I don’t know. I know she’s done some work as a medium and she does a lot of stuff with crystals and sage so…” she shrugged again. “Maybe?”

They took turns in the shower this time. By the time he was finished and had brushed his teeth and changed into the clothes he’d stuffed in an overnight bag as quickly as he could the night before, Darcy was back downstairs, this time on her laptop and phone at the same time.

“Carol, did you send me state secrets or something?” she was asking as he descended her stairs again. She bent over her laptop with a frown. “It’s asking for a second security code,” she stated. “Do you have that?” Another pause and she started typing slowly, one key at a time. When she finished, she cleared her throat. “Okay, I’m in. Do I have to sign an NDA or something?” She smiled and nodded. “Got it. No one know I have these. Thanks C.”

“No one knows you have what?” he asked once Darcy had hung up. He sat next to her on the couch again. Bossy chirped as she entered the room and raced over to jump up onto his lap. In the kitchen, he could hear the Rat Pack crunching on some kibble, their collars tapping against ceramic bowls. He scratched Bossy’s ears and smiled when she rubbed her head under his chin, scratching herself on his beard.

“The stuff Carol wrangled back from the state,” Darcy informed him, still focused on her laptop screen. “I thought it was town charter stuff, but she said it’s scans from Pierce’s personal diary?” she shook her head. “All kinds of extra security about it—I guess whatever’s left of the Pierce family doesn’t want it known what a misogynist douche their great-grandfather was.”

He felt his brow wrinkle in confusion. “Even after four hundred years?”

She glanced over. “Kind of makes you wonder if they still share his views on things, huh?”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “Kind of does.”

“There’s a stipulation,” she went on, “Carol said that Silas Pierce—who I think was the one who handed this stuff over to the state historians in the first place back in like, 1900—said they couldn’t publish this particular information until 2025.”

He did the math in his head quickly. “365 years after Pierce’s death?”

She shrugged. “Apparently that’s long enough to avoid too much shame…or whatever they were trying to do by suppressing all of this for that long.”

“Consider me way more curious than I was an hour ago.”

They were interrupted, just as he was about to lean in when Darcy opened the pdf, by the sound of a car pulling into the driveway and a door closing a moment later.

Steve had no trouble believing that Wanda was a witch. She arrived on Darcy’s doorstep in a long, flowing skirt and short tank top, a wrap of floaty material wound around her shoulders. Thin wrists covered in bracelets, black nail polish and silver rings on her fingers.

She and Darcy greeted each other with a hug and a kiss before Darcy interlaced their hands and pulled her up the porch steps. “Wanda, this is Steve,” she said as they crossed the threshold into the house together. “Steve, this is Wanda Maximoff.”

Wanda extended a hand with a friendly smile.

“Nice to meet you,” Steve said, standing up to shake her hand.

The moment their hands touched the expression dropped from her face. Only for a moment, but long enough for him to catch it. She stared at him for a long second, her face blank, before she blink and worked to bring her smile back to her face. “You—um,” she took her hand back. “You as well.”

Darcy closed the door and stepped to stand between them. She clapped her hands together lightly and turned her eyes from Wanda to Steve and back again. “Soo…ready to get really mad at me?”

Darcy had not misjudged her best friend. Wanda was—to put it mildly—really mad.

“Are you out of your _fucking mind?!”_ she practically screeched when Darcy got to the part of the story where she’d laid down money and brought the Ouija board home. “Do you think they put all that shit in horror movies because it’s _funny?”_ she demanded.

“Wanda—”

“That has to be the number one rule of homeownership; they practically write it into the insurance policies! Jesus Christ, Darcy, what were you thinking?”

“Oh, Wanda, my love,” Darcy reached gently for her hand and pulled her back down to the couch. “It get so much worse than this, don’t worry.”

She finished telling her what happened. The planchette indicating more than one spirit. The name. The message. The mirror dropping from the wall.

“And then what?”

Darcy and Steve exchanged a glance. “Then what, what?” Steve asked. “I threw some clothes in a bag and we ran over here.”

“Where’s the board?”

Another glance. “It’s…over there.”

Wanda’s already large eyes widened to the size of dinner plates. “Did you close the door, at least?”

“To the house?” he asked.

She looked ready to flip the coffee table. “To the _other side_.”

“Oh,” Darcy said with a single nod before she shook her head. “No. No we didn’t do that.”

Wanda dropped her head into her hands. “Oh my God.”

“Wait,” he frowned. “What exactly did we mess up by just leaving?”

She sighed and looked up. “Maybe nothing,” she said with a shrug. “Maybe you let a whole host of otherworldly beings cross over into your house all night, or maybe you let the ones who are already there get a whole lot stronger. This is why you don’t _fuck around,”_ she punctuated her reminder with a smack to Darcy’s thigh, ”with those things.”

“Lesson overwhelmingly learned,” Darcy said dryly. “Are you done yelling? Because I would actually love your help de-ghosting Steve’s house.”

She ran her hands over her face and seemed to be summoning her own strength or patience before she inhaled deeply and stood up again. “Fine,” she said. “Let’s go find out what your ghost wants.” She looked behind her and pointed at Darcy. “ _You_ stay here. You’ve done enough.”

Steve hesitated on the front porch, his keys clenched painfully in his closed fist. He didn’t want to go back into his house. Especially not after everything that Wanda had said.

_Don’t listen to her. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about._

He put the key into the lock and turned the knob, fighting the urge to wince as he pushed open the door. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting. His things to be flying around the living room. Lights blinking on and off wildly. Blood dripping from the walls.

But there was nothing.

Nothing but a shattered mirror, topped candles and wax on the coffee table and hardwoods, and the spirit board in the middle where they’d left it last night.

 _There’s nothing wrong here._ The thought comforted him—a quiet little hope that he wouldn’t have to burn the place down and salt the earth just yet.

_She’s just another stupid bitch who doesn’t know what she’s talking about._

“What did you say?” Wanda asked sharply.

He turned around, confused. “I didn’t say anything.”

He hadn’t, he told himself, still frowning.

Right?

Wanda eyed him warily as she crossed to the coffee table. “First thing’s first,” she said as she moved the planchette to the word _Goodbye_. Once she’d put the board away, she looked back up at Steve. “Where is the activity been, mostly?”

“All over,” he admitted. He told her about the cold spots throughout the house, the figure by his bed, the scratching from the basement. All the while his eyes watching as she moved around the living room and then into the dining room.

She was studying, listening, waiting for something to jump out at her.

_Like she fucking owns the place._

Steve stopped and shook his head. This wasn’t right. There was something bubbling in the back of his throat. Something that felt like anger. Like rage. Something that was telling him it would only be so easy to reach out and grab Wanda by the back of her long, graceful neck—

“Who told you to buy this house?’

Her question took him off guard. It derailed that horrible rush he’d just felt. “What do you mean?”

She turned around, her eyes studying him now, wide and curious as they stood on opposite sides of his empty dining room. “I mean why did you—a single man who, according to you, has never lived outside of twenty square blocks of Brooklyn—by _this_ house?”

“Well, I…” he paused, his mouth open. “I mean, it was…”

“No bullshit about a good price or wanting a project,” she said. “There are a million houses anywhere that you could have picked. You bought this house for a reason,” she reminded him gently, as if she knew she was pushing on a bruise that was going to hurt. “What was it?”

“It felt like it was already mine.” His voice was low, the words a mumble somewhere under the confusion of their truth and the disbelief he’d said it out loud. “Like it…like it was—”

“Calling out to you?” she finished.

He nodded slowly, that anger beginning to simmer again the longer they looked at each other. She had no business here. In _his_ house. On _his_ land. Acting like she knew what was going on. Acting like she could help. Like she could force _him—_

“I need some air,” he said abruptly and walked past her, into the kitchen and out the side door.

The second he was outside, he felt better. His head clearer, his heart no longer racing, that rage and hatred no longer churning like acid at the back of his throat. He took in a few big gulps of late October air until he felt entirely like himself again.

“Steve?” Wanda’s voice behind him was tentative. “You okay?”

“No,” he shook his head. Looking at Wanda now, he couldn’t understand where all those thoughts had come from. She was no threat to him. She was just there to help. He couldn’t hurt her—he’d never hurt a woman in his life. Or anyone else, for that matter. “I felt…I don’t know. Did you—get anything?”

“Oh yeah,” she nodded. “There’s a lot of ugliness in there.” She crossed her willowy arms over her chest and shivered before she coughed. “Is there…um…do you have anything else you can do today while I do a more thorough walk-through?”

There was one thing he could do that had been nibbling at the back of his mind since he first opened Darcy’s folder of news articles. “Yeah,” he nodded, still feeling fuzzy. “Are you going to be okay by yourself?”

Wanda pursed her lips. “Given what I just picked up in there?” she motioned to the still-open kitchen door. “I think you’re the one we need to worry about.”

“Why?”

“Because whoever that is? That dark, ugly spirit that you’ve been seeing?” she crossed her arm again and swallowed hard.

“Not so fond of me, is it?” Steve asked, managing a rueful smile.

“No,” Wanda shook her head. “It really, _really_ likes you.” Her tone made his stomach drop with dread. “And that’s much worse.”

***

Access to Wilson Fisk was much easier than Steve thought it would be. It was a quick search on Darcy’s laptop, a phone call and a lie about how he knew the patient, and his name was on the list of approved visitors when he was buzzed through triple-secure doors an hour later.

The state hospital was a huge, sprawling estate thirty miles north of Pierce Landing with a mossy statue of one of the founding fathers, a classic governor’s driveway, and tight rows of bars on all the windows.

 _Something right out of a horror movie,_ Steve had thought as he parked his motorcycle and made his way to the front door.

The only photos Steve had ever seen of Wilson Fisk were from the papers, the articles surrounding his trial. In 1978, he’d been tall and slender, with shaggy dark hair and a thick mustache. The man who shuffled out to meet him in the visitor’s room, with its armed security guards and round-edged furniture, was 77 years old. Still tall, but with a paunchy stomach and loose, wrinkled skin beneath the sleeves of his dark blue jumpsuit. His hair was steely gray and close-cropped to his head and his eyes were dark, hooded, and eyed Steve suspiciously as he they sat down across from each other.

“They tell me you’re my nephew,” he said when Steve had introduced himself. No shaking hands, though. The guards had been clear about that. “Thought that seemed a bit strange,” he said before Steve could stammer through his lie again. “Seeing as I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“I’m not your nephew,” Steve admitted, lowering his voice, although it didn’t seem like anyone else in the wing was listening. “I bought your house a few weeks ago.”

Fisk sat up straighter, his eyes narrowing further. “Just you livin’ there?”

“Yeah,” he nodded and mirrored Fisk, clasping his hands together on top of the table. A silence passed between them while Steve tried to figure out how to ask his questions.

The other man cleared his throat. “Listen, I don’t know if they told you, but you only got twenty minutes to talk to me. So, whatever you think I’m gonna tell you—”

“Just tell me what happened,” he said quickly. He _had_ been told about their time limit. “What really happened when you moved in.”

He expected a snap, maybe a sarcastic reminder that his testimony was still public record, that Steve had wasted a trip coming to see him. Wilson Fisk had not changed one syllable of his story in forty-two years. He’d never appealed his ruling and he’d never accepted an opportunity for parole. Steve didn’t know exactly what he was hoping for.

Across from him, Fisk dropped his eyes to his clasped hands again and stared for what felt like a long time. “It didn’t start when we moved in,” he said finally, his voice low. “It started when she found that crack in the basement wall.”

“Crack?” Steve echoed, not sure he’d heard correctly.

“She wanted to finish it,” Fisk explained, sounding tired. “Put up paneling, lay down carpet,” he shrugged. “Make it like another living room, I guess, I don’t know. But she found this crack in the wall. In the concrete. And it was…” he shook his head. “It was all she could talk about. How she thought there was another room down there. How we had to knock this wall down and get to it. How something must be back there…”

“…Because of a crack in the concrete?” Steve repeated.

“And if it was just that, I would’ve let it go,” he went on as if Steve hadn’t said anything. “But then she started getting real weird.”

The hair on the back of his neck began to stand on end when he asked, “Weird how?”

“Cats started showing up from all over the neighborhood. She stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. All she’d talk about is what was down in the basement. I kept finding her down there, trying to widen that crack, trying to—to claw it open with her fingernails. I told her I’d take care of it—that I’d get the blueprints from the city and see if she was right. And if she was, I told her we’d knock the wall down and go from there but—” he shook his head again. “But she just wouldn’t _stop._ Even after I got the prints and I showed her there was nothing there, she just kept _picking at it.”_ His jaw clenched in a tight square at the same times his wrinkled hands curled into fists. “ _Clawing_ at it. She was like some rabid dog. I keep thinking I’m hearing her talking to someone down there. All night. Her ear pressed to the wall. She’s doing these…rituals down there. Summoning something. Telling whatever’s down there that she’s going to kill me—”

“But you didn’t…” Steve cut him off, trying not to feel deflated. “While you were living there, I mean, you didn’t see anything…” he coughed. “Strange?”

“Stranger than my wife making a deal with the devil and trying to suck out my soul while I slept?”

“Yes,” he made himself say. “I mean strange like…like things moving on their own or doors opening and closing…” he swallowed hard. “Did you ever see a figure at the foot of your bed?”

Fisk looked at him strangely, his eyes crinkled at the sides in confusion. “Not a _figure_ , son,” he all but scoffed. “A man. And of course I saw him. He’s the one who told me Vanessa was a witch.” He looked him square in the eye now, not a hint of humor or confusion in his face. “He’s the one who told me I had to kill her.”

***

It was dark by the time Steve pulled up to his driveway. The lights were off at his place and he tucked his bike key into his jacket and went straight to Darcy’s house. Inside, a pizza box was open on her coffee table—she really _did_ always want pizza, he thought with a small smile—and the room was scattered with books, scans and printouts. The Rat Pack and Bossy were lounging on a few, but on the couch and loveseat, Darcy and Wanda each had a stack.

“Find anything good?” he asked, setting his jacket on the hook by the door and his helmet on the ground by his shoes.

“Uh, anything?” Darcy asked. “Yes. Plenty. Oceans of it.” She looked up and pushed her large glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Anything good?” she clarified. “No. Absolutely nothing good.”

“What is all this?” he asked.

“The diary of Alexander Pierce,” Wanda said, not looking up from her page. “Fair warning,” she added. “It’s horrible.”

Steve frowned as Darcy moved a stack and motioned for him to sit next to her. “Horrible how?”

Darcy took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes before she put them back on and set her pages aside. “So you know how this morning, we read about Pierce pardoning Sarah Rogers?”

He nodded. “Yeah, you said she was the only one he pardoned.”

“She was,” Darcy agreed, looking much sadder as she glanced down at the pages she must have spent the whole afternoon reading. “He pardoned her so her husband and her sons could leave the settlement safely, without any sort of guilt-by-association hanging over their heads.”

“She didn’t get to go with them?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“No,” Darcy said quietly, pointing to a pile of scans next to the pizza box. “That was the deal. They left with a cleared name and got a fresh start somewhere new…and she stayed here. With Pierce.”

Steve stopped, mid-reach for the stack of paper. “ _With_ him?”

She nodded. “He thought she was a witch; he told her he’d let her go when she worked a spell that made him immortal.”

He blinked. “Immortal? Seriously?”

“He was convinced she was the most powerful of the coven he executed—and that she owed him for allowing the devil to take his wife from him—”

“Jesus Christ…”

“It gets so much worse,” Wanda assured him.

“He put her in this little room in the back corner of his root cellar,” Darcy went on. “Apparently not even his kids knew she was there.”

“How long?”

“Years,” she said sadly. “He kept her chained up like a dog. Never let her go outside. Barely enough food and water to survive. He kept telling her she had the key to her own freedom. That he’d let her go as soon as she did the spell. But every year he got older…” Darcy trailed off, a thoughtful, sad look on her face.

“What?” he asked, looking between Darcy and Wanda.

“He started torturing her,” Wanda picked up the thread, tossing her own pages down into her lap in disgust. “Pulled her teeth out one by one, ripped out her fingernails, made her eat pages from his bible...” she shook her head. “Sick fucking bastard.”

“So what happened when she finally died?” Steve asked, feeling sick.

“Nothing good,” Darcy said quietly.

“He didn’t even bury her,” Wanda said, the words looking like they tasted rotten on her tongue. “He didn’t want to desecrate his land by burying the body of a witch, so he just sealed her little cell and left her body to rot.”

He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and ran his hands over his face. “God, no wonder she’s so angry.”

Wanda cleared her throat, making him look up. “She’s not who you’ve been seeing, Steve.”

“No?”

“No,” she shook her head. “She’s the one who reached out to you at first—I think she’s tried to do this a few times over the last few hundred years—but she’s not…” she pursed her lips. “That ugly spirit I mentioned before? The one that likes you so much?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s not Sarah. That’s Alexander Pierce.”

“Wanda thinks he’s the one who started talking to us last night,” Darcy added. “But that Sarah took over when she thought he was trying to convince us he was friendly.”

“So Pierce is still there and Sarah is still there,” he echoed. “That would explain what happened with the Fisks.”

“Like I said, I think Sarah has been trying to reach someone for a long time. But every time she gets close, Pierce makes it so whatever woman she’s latched onto is silenced.”

The words hung over the room. The silence was sad and heavy before Steve finally spoke again. “So, what can we do?”

“I’m not an expert,” Wanda reminded them both, seeing their matching expectant expressions. “But I’ve done this once or twice before. We just need to get Pierce’s spirit out of there and let Sarah’s move on peacefully.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Darcy said, sounding hopeful.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Wanda assured her. “And I don’t think we can do it with just the three of us. We need a little extra muscle—do you have any other friends?”

For the first time in what felt like forever, Steve felt a mild flicker of hope. “As a matter of fact, I do.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read and commented on this little fic and especially those who went outside their comfort zone and read something spooky. I hope you all enjoy the ending while I get started on something new (and keep working on finishing up some old things too, don't worry) for November.
> 
> All the kisses and wishes for an extra happy Halloween, my kittens.
> 
> <3

v.

Sam answered on the second ring. “What’s up, man? How’s the simple life?”

“Uh—” Steve rubbed at the back of his neck. “Complicated. How’s the city?”

“Same as you left it,” Sam said easily. “Seriously, how’s it going? How’s the house?”

“Haunted,” he blurted out. He’d never been able to keep anything from Sam.

Sam chuckled. “For real? You got creepy wet Asian ghost kids climbing on the walls?”

“Not exactly.”

“Someone writing ‘Redrum’ all over your mirrors?”

“Uh, no,” Steve shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Listen—”

“Is that Steve?” Bucky’s voice came through in the background.

“Yeah,” Sam answered away from the microphone. “He says his house is haunted.”

“Native American burial ground-haunted?” Bucky asked. “Or like… _Exorcist_ haunted?”

“How many fucking horror movies have you two seen?” Steve interrupted, his patience running short.

“Enough to know that I’m the one most likely to die if I get involved with any of that shit,” Sam said, coming back to their conversation.

“No one’s going to die,” Steve said firmly. “But I actually do need your help.”

By the time he hung up, both Sam and Bucky had agreed to make the two-hour trip north. Darcy looked up from her book, her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “For real?” she asked. “Just like that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think they actually believe me,” he admitted as he sat back down next to her. “But yeah, they’re coming up tomorrow.”

Across the room, Wanda untangled her legs from beneath herself and stretched her arms overhead. “Okay, well, I’m going home to get what I need and give myself a little psychic deep conditioning before we do this tomorrow.” She crossed over to Darcy and dropped a kiss to the top of her head before she glanced at Steve. “Do me a favor,” she pointed at him. “Don’t go back home without somebody with you.”

“Oh,” Darcy placed an arm across his chest like a lock-bar on a rollercoaster. “He’s not going anywhere.”

He held up his right hand. “Scouts’ honor.”

She nodded but didn’t look convinced. “I’m not kidding,” she said after a moment. “Any time you spend over there is time that Pierce’s spirit has to infect you.”

Steve nodded, an unpleasant feeling twisting his gut. “I’m really not interested in going back over there until we’re all sure how we’re going to get him out.”

“You let me worry about that,” she said with a small smile before she bid them both good night and let herself out, locking the door behind her.

He looked over at Darcy as she stood to clean up the mess of books and scans and empty cans of fizzy water. “So now what?”

“ _Now,_ ” Darcy said definitively as she piled everything to one side of the coffee table and picked up the empty pizza box to take to the garbage, “we chill out and you get some sleep.”

“I’m not feeling very tired,” he confessed, even as he rubbed his face with his hands. It wasn’t that he wasn’t tired, he realized. It was that he didn’t trust that if he closed his eyes, even in Darcy’s cloud of a bed upstairs, he’d be able to fall asleep.

“I know,” she said on her way into the kitchen. He heard the water running and something clattering on the stovetop before she returned, wiping wet hands on the sides of her leggings. “But since I already tried to tire you out with sex and _that_ didn’t work—”

“Oh, hey,” he perked up. “That has nothing to do with you—and I’m more than willing to try that avenue again.”

She grinned as she leaned in and kissed him. “I thought you’d say that,” she said, pulling away before she scrunched her nose. “Unfortunately, reading about torture and misogyny all day has kinda put a damper on my libido.”

He smiled and slid a hand up into her hair to keep her close enough to kiss again. “And the strikes against Pierce just keep on comin’.”

“I know, right?” she shook her head and gently pushed back from him. “Anyway. I slept slightly better than you did last night,” she went on. “But still not great, so I’m making tea.”

“Tea?”

“The knockout kind,” she clarified. “Chamomile. Would you like a cup?”

He shrugged. “Sure?”

She smiled and gave him one last peck. “And would you also like to tell me good memories about your mom and Bucky and Sam while we drink it?”

He felt his eyebrows lift. “Um. Sure? I guess? If you…really want to hear about that?”

“I do,” she assured him. “And more than that, I want you to have positive things fresh in your mind about the people who love you when we go back over there tomorrow.”

“You worried I might get possessed?”

“By a woman-hating, holier-than-thou lunatic with a track record for that exact thing?” she asked. “Yeah, maybe a little. But only because I have a lot of sexy plans for you that don’t involve anyone else sharing your psyche so,” she moved her shoulder as the kettle began to whistle and she straightened back up. “Call me selfish.”

“That’s not a word I’d use to describe you.”

They drank tea on her couch and Darcy listened to him tell her stories about how Bucky used to pull him out of fights with bullies three times his size, how Sam became his friend on the first day of freshman year and had introduced him to all the greatest music he’d ever heard, and even to stories about how his mother had gone so above and beyond every year to make Christmas as special for her boy as she possibly could on their shoestring budget.

He wasn’t sure if it was the tea, the memories, or the company, but when Darcy turned out her downstairs lights and led him back to her bedroom a few hours later, Steve was asleep before his head even hit the pillow.

***

It was nearly nightfall the next day by the time they found themselves standing in Steve’s basement, watching while Wanda drew a large star on the floor in white chalk.

Sam looked dubious. “So, a pentagram?” he asked, glanced from Steve to Wanda and back again. “That feels like the best move?”

Even after hearing everything that had been going on, Sam remained the skeptic. Steve knew he believed him—in the way that Sam always believed him, because they were best friends and that was part of the code—but he also knew that Sam was one of the most logical people he knew. He was going along with this and keeping his eyes peeled for reasonable explanations.

Wanda straightened up and crossed to the bag she’d brought. “It’s just a star,” she reminded. “Not a pentagram. And even if it was, there’s nothing evil about it.” She offered a small smile. “Don’t believe everything you saw on _The Craft_.”

“Okay, fair,” Bucky agreed, accepting the white pillar candle she handed him. “But Steve said this was like an exorcism.” He glanced around the room. “Don’t we need a priest or something?”

Bucky had always been more superstitious, more willing to believe in something existing beyond the veil; and he’d decided Steve’s house was haunted the minute he’d laid eyes on it. Standing in the basement of said haunted house, trying to evict the evil spirits haunting it, seemed to be a logical next step he had no problem taking.

Wanda shook her head. “The spirit we’re driving out is a Christian Puritan who did most of his evildoing in the name of God,” she said simply. “I don’t want to use anything that he might recognize and claim for his own. And,” she turned back after she’d handed a candle to Steve, “seeing all this pagan stuff in the house he still considers to be his will probably piss him off, which I’m all for.”

Steve cleared his throat. “Yeah, um, about that…” he rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t…” he looked around. “I don’t really feel anything bad in here today,” he admitted. “Do you?”

Wanda shook her head. “I don’t,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

“You think he’s still here?” Darcy asked, voicing the impossibly naïve hope Steve had been clinging to. That Pierce had decided to move on his own and none of this would be necessary.

“I think he’s always here,” Wanda assured her. “He’s probably listening to us right now.”

A chill crept up Steve’s spine like spider-crawling icy fingers and he rubbed at his neck again. “Well then he knows what we’re going to do,” he said, willing his resolve to hold and his courage to stay in place. “No reason to wait.” He looked back at Wanda. “What else do you need?”

“Just a few more things,” she said before she stepped up to speak to him in a lower voice. Darcy wandered back to Sam and Bucky, placing them purposefully around the points of the star. “I don’t want to scare you, but before I do this, I want to make sure you know that it’s probably not going to be all that fun for you.”

He huffed out a quick, humorless laugh. “I didn’t think it was going to be.”

“No, Steve,” she placed a hand on his arm. “I’ve been thinking about this. With the last few occupants of this house, Pierce and Sarah each have had a clear line of who they relate to, who they can dig into the easiest. But…” she paused and bit her lip. “But you’ve been here by yourself.”

“And?”

“And I think they’ve been fighting over you,” she said, almost as an admission she hadn’t wanted to make. “I’m concerned that since there are more of us now—about to stir everything up—that Sarah might try her luck with someone else and Pierce could have you all to himself.”

The thought made his stomach churn. The brief flashes of thoughts Pierce had put in his head the day before had been bad enough. To be fully possessed by someone that hateful and violent would be torture. He glanced to the space beneath the stairs, where, a month ago, he’d set a bunch of demolition tools, thinking he’d be down here the next day to get them. Among them, a sledgehammer. “Well,” he inhaled evenly. “If that happens and it looks like I’m going to hurt someone,” he managed a quick, nervous smile when Wanda’s eyes followed him to the hammer. “I give you full permission to take me out before I do.”

She smiled back, just as nervous. “Let’s do what we can to make sure it doesn’t get to that point.”

She needed them to each stand at a point on the star while she poured a circle of salt around them and placed in each triangle something to represent each element. Seashells, crystals, feathers, herbs, and large, heavy chunks of basalt. She lit another candle to place in the very center. When she’d finished, she lit her own candle by the light of that one and slowly passed the flame to each of them as she took her place in their circle.

As soon as the last candle was lit, Wanda motioned for them to follow her in placing them at their feet. When he straightened up, Steve felt another chill. A definite drop in the temperature of the room. He glanced around at his friends. Everyone else had felt it too. To his left, Sam reached out and grabbed his hand. On the right, Bucky did the same without hesitation. At the bottom points of the star, Wanda and Darcy clasped hands and reached out to complete the circle.

Wanda cleared her throat, settled herself, and closed her eyes. “Alexander Pierce,” she said, solemn, but not threatening. “I know you’re here with us. I know you know why we’re here. I know you may not realize it,” she went on. “But we’re here to help you.”

The room got even colder. The lights of the candles flickered as if a breath had blown over them.

“The candle in the middle of our circle, Alexander,” Wanda continued. “That’s for you. That’s the light you need to step into in order to cross over.” From above them, there was a groan. Like the sound of slow footsteps on floorboards. “I know it must be painful for you,” Wanda said, her eyes still closed. Steve could see the goosebumps raised on her slim arms. “It’s painful to hold on to something that’s no longer yours. And this house, this land, is no longer yours.”

At the top of the stairs, the basement door slammed shut. They all jumped, but Wanda was not deterred. “Come into our circle,” she coaxed gently. “Step into the light and be done with this place. Everything you’ve done…everything you’re trying to perpetuate…it must be painful.” She coughed. “We want to help you—to—” she coughed again. More of a gag that time.

The flames flickered again. Steve thought he saw some of the feathers rustle against the ground.

“Wanda?”

Darcy’s timid voice snapped Steve’s eyes up again. Across from him, Wanda had broken the circle. Her hands were on her own throat, her eyes bugged and watering.

“Hey!” Sam cried as they dropped their hands. He was closest to her and took hold of her shoulders. “What’s going on?” Wanda’s black-painted fingernails were scratching at her neck while her mouth gaped like a fish. “You’re choking?” He asked in full paramedic mode. She nodded frantically.

“Let her go,” Steve said finally, glancing away from his friends and around the room.

“Steve, she’s—”

“Pierce,” Steve raised his voice and cut off Sam’s confused protests. “Let her go. She’s trying to help you.”

Wanda was released; she sucked in deep breaths, gasping and heaving while Sam stayed in front of her, checking her over. “Steve,” she wheezed, “don’t—”

_“Don’t need the help of a filthy little witch.”_

Everyone froze.

The voice had come from all around them. A cold, cruel whisper that slipped between them like a gust of wind.

_“It speaks in lies and defiles the very tongue God gave it,”_ the voice hissed. _“All it wants is to send me to hell.”_

“Well, we all get what we deserve, Pierce,” Steve said, a strange familiar feeling taking hold over him. The urge to bait. To see how far he could push someone bigger than himself before they hit back. “Isn’t that what you told Sarah all those years?”

The crystals and basalt rocks started to rattle against the floor.

“Steve, stop,” Wanda croaked. “He isn’t going to—”

_Do not speak for me, witch._

A crack splintered in the small window at the foot of the stairs. The room itself began to shake. Their breath started to appear in clouds in front of their faces.

“You’re not welcome here, Pierce,” Steve called, raising his voice above the low roar filling the room. “You’ve done more than enough damage for one lifetime. It’s time for you to move on.”

“Steve, it’s getting dodgy in here,” Bucky warned as one of Wanda’s crystals flew across the room, narrowly missing his head when it smashed against the wall. The feathers and herbs swirled as a surge of wind whipped around the room like a tornado. “I think you’re just pissing him off.”

“This guy’s been getting away with murder, making people turn on their wives and daughters and racking up a body count for four hundred years and I’m supposed to care about his feelings?” he demanded, not really asking Bucky, or Wanda, or anyone else. He felt like he was slipping out of his own control. There was so much anger inside of him. So much sadness. So much hopelessness that didn’t feel like his own. “This isn’t his house anymore. This isn’t his land. He can’t just keep—”

Steve didn’t get to finish his thought. The words cut off somewhere in the back of throat as one of the basalt rocks lifted itself off the ground and flew across the room, connecting with his head.

He didn’t think he was out for very long, but he couldn’t be sure. When he came to, he was standing, breathing heavily, feeling drained and disoriented.

The room was still. Wanda, Sam, Bucky, and Darcy had all been knocked over and were struggling to sit up again. Steve looked around, trying to figure out what had happened, what had knocked them over, before he looked down and saw the sledgehammer in his hands. The dust and chunks of concrete he was covered in.

He looked up and stared in shock at the giant hole he had knocked in the wall.

“Steve, get back,” Darcy cried, scrambling to her feet to pull him away.

He stumbled back toward his friends, the hammer falling from his hands as a low, mournful wail came from the other side of the wall. It chilled his blood as it built slowly into a long, sustained shriek of anguish.

They covered their ears, wincing at the sound. His fillings rattled in his teeth as all six of the candles relit themselves in place around the star.

“Sarah Rogers, I presume?” Bucky yelled over the screeching.

“Finally got someone to let her out,” Wanda realized out loud. She pointed to the star. “Get back in the circle. Everyone.”

They did as they were told, hurrying into place to clasp hands again. The wind in the room had picked up again, all the salt and herbs and crystals, shells and feathers swirled around them once more but it no longer felt so sinister. “Sarah,” Darcy cried as the floor began to rumble again and the room began to shake. “This is your fight. Don’t let him get away with what he did to you.”

“Bring him in and cast him out,” Wanda raised her voice over the din. She looked around their circle, urging them to repeat with her.

_Bring him in and cast him out_

The words tasted different on his tongue as their five voices began to chant together. He could practically see them swirling like ink in the air around them, encircling their arms and clasped hands, locking them together.

Still chanting, the stared, eyes wide and disbelieving as the flame in the center candle burst upward in a tower of light. There was a roar and an inhuman screech from all around them in the moment before the light exploded and blew them all back, the force breaking their hands apart and sending their bodies to all corners of the room.

And then there was silence.

Peaceful, beautiful silence as one by one, the candles relit themselves a second time. The flowers and the herbs that had been whipping around the room landed in a small, perfect circle in the center of the star.

The candle in the center was gone. Obliterated.

Wanda pulled herself up to sitting first, shaking her head and pushing her hair back from her sweaty forehead. “I think he’s gone,” she said, staring around the room.

But Steve knew for certain that he was. For the first time since he’d set foot in the house, he felt like he could breathe.

***

_One year later_

All that had been left of Sarah Rogers had been carefully excavated from Steve’s basement by the local authorities. She was cremated and laid to rest in a small cemetery in Brooklyn. Darcy had spent months trying to track down where her husband and sons had been buried, hoping to reunite their family in death, but nearly four hundred years was just long enough for those records to be lost. The best she’d been able to do—with the help of a cheek swab from Steve and too many sleepless nights tracing genealogy—was suggest they bury her with the most recent of her descendants.

Her many-greats grandson and his wife who happened to share her name.

Wanda had suggested that it was that connection that finally let Sarah get the upper hand in her fight against Pierce. That blood had called out to blood and that’s really why he’d bought the house, why he felt like a part of him was already there, part of the land and the foundation.

Because in a way, part of him was.

And lucky, Bucky had added while they had stayed up all that night talking and laughing and trying to decompress, that stubbornness and an intolerance for bullies seemed to run in the family.

Steve looked down at the small headstone beside his parents’ and smiled when he felt Darcy slip her hand into his and squeeze. He glanced over to find her smiling back at him. “I gotta think they’re all super proud of you,” she said, giving him a nudge.

His chest felt a little tighter as he nodded. “I hope so.”

He bent and set the flowers they’d brought on each of the graves. For the father he’d never known, who had died before he was born. For the mother who had loved him and raised him so well on her own. And finally, for the woman who’d saved him from being taken over by Pierce’s hateful spirit so that he could save her in return.

Darcy crouched down beside him and squeeze his arm again. “I’ll give you a minute.”

He didn’t have much to say when Darcy left, but he appreciated the moment to himself. He traced his fingers gently over the freshly carved stone, seemingly out of place for the dates it listed.

_Sarah Rogers_

_1621 – 1650_

_Fierce and good until the very end_

Steve smiled and gave the earth a soft pat. “I hope you can rest now, Sarah.”

Darcy was leaning against his bike when he made his way back to the parking lot. “Ready to go, neighbor?” she asked, already shaking back her hair to pull her helmet on.

He laughed. “Get that out of your system now,” he reminded. “Starting tomorrow, we’re roommates.”

She grinned and stretched up on her toes to pull him in for a long, sweet kiss. “I can’t wait,” she said, even though she’d been complaining about hauling her things from her place into his all month while she waited for the sale to close and the new owners of her cottage to set a move-in date.

He smiled against her lips. “Neither can I,” he said softly before he kissed her again.

“Everybody still good to come up for Thanksgiving?” she asked, sliding onto the bike behind him once he’d sat down.

“As long as we’re still good to cook for everyone.”

“Are you kidding me?” she scoffed. “That beautiful new kitchen that I helped build? You’re gonna have to drag me out of there, pal.”

Steve turned around and grabbed her hip, pulling her to sit more snugly against him. “I can think of more pleasant ways to get you out of the kitchen that don’t involve dragging.”

“Well what are you waiting for?” she squeezed his hips with her thighs and giggled. “Take me home.”

Steve started the bike and revved the engine—because it made Darcy squeal and hug him tighter—and started the drive north.

Heading home.

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> You know I can't help myself, right?
> 
> Photoset: https://idontgettechnology.tumblr.com/post/629295978177019904/coming-october-2020-claw-marks  
> Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3c2ZxY9DVg6GTw3ubKEHqd?si=4HVAMuNUTAm12ZDE1o_4Kw
> 
> My fanfic podcast: ishipitpod.com 
> 
> *kisses*


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